undelete a folder ?

[Billie Walsh]

Sylviane et Perry White wrote:
> On Monday 03 March 2008 18:57, Billie Walsh wrote:
>> I don't know about Linux in general or Kubuntu in particular but
>>
>> IF you haven't written anything else to the disk
>> If you can open the disk and see the file system
> You only see intact files, including  backup (with a trailing ~ in linux) and
> hidden (with a leading . in Linux) if your setting is for that.
>> When you "delete" a file it will often just remove
> Yes
>> [ change the referrence ] the file name
> Then logically it should not just change but also mark a freed.
>> in the allocation table [ I think it's called ]. 
> Yes
> 
> AFAIK unless you "shred" a file, it is not immediately destroyed, only the 
> space it occupied on the drive is marked as free, you're right on that point.
> How this is done may be more closely dependant on the file system than on the 
> operating system. (?)
> I belive there is often some redundancy between the  allocation table and meta 
> data stored in the tracks and sectors so it may be possible, starting from a 
> sector that contained part of your your file or a pointer to it, to follow 
> the links down (and up ?) to reconstruct that file.
> (I have used a track-editor to salvage files on a disquette but it was 
> incommensurably smaller than a present HD, and I used context rather of 
> meta-data because there were text files)
>> Sometimes I have been able to find this listing and redo the name.
> I whish you could be more explicit here.
> 
> Best adwise I can provide if you really want to recover important deleted 
> files would be, as soon as you notice the problem, to boot from another 
> partition or CD and mount the partition with your data read only  because the 
> system itself writes ans updates countless files all the time and they all 
> can definitively eradicate parts of your data.
> 
> Perry
> 

It's been years since I had to do this and I can't remember just how I 
managed to get to the right place. I was recovering a file but it seems 
that I used DOS to do a "dir" then renamed the file with the correct name.

As I said it's been years and I'm not sure just how I did it, but it was 
something along these lines I'm sure.

I'm not a CLI guru but if you can get to a CLI only and show the 
directory listing in the correct place you might see where the name of 
the folder/file has been changed to tell the system "this space is free" 
in some way. If so just rename it to it's correct name.

Worth a shot anyway.

-- 
Life is what happens while your busy making other plans.