Converting ext3 to ext4 resulting in loss of data?

[Martin Webster]

On Tue, 2010-08-10 at 15:38 +0100, James Hogarth wrote:

> > Yes, a high price indeed!
> > Photorec recovers most of the files, but it gives them random 
> > filenames. LOL.
> > Now I can imagine myself sorting the files based on file types and
> > starting from doc files first, then opening the 2000+ doc files one
> > by one and rename it accordingly.
> > LOL. DARN!!! ^^

<snip>

> Yup that's because it has grabs the raw file data from the disk as it
> sees it and tries to be intelligent over what it finds to determine
> filetype and start/end of files.....
> 
> However metadata such as date modified, names and so on are not stored
> in the file itself but in the 'index' of the filesystem (exact
> behaviour depends on filesystem with extX, FAT, NTFS being slightly
> different in implementation)... as such seeing as you formatted and
> nuked this information it doesn't know it.... so can only give it a
> random name whilst guessing filetype.... good luck ^^ 

If they're Office files there are Meta data contained in the files that
you could use to reconstruct the file names. It should be fairly easy to
write a BASH or Perl script to extract this information and rename the
files.

I'm out tonight so won't see your reply until tomorrow... in the mean
time check out wvSummary:

sudo apt-get install wv

Meta data includes some of the following: Full File Path,File
Name,Created Date,Created Time,Last Saved By,Revision Number,Last
Modified Date,Last Modified Time,Number of Words,Editing Time,Created
By,Last Printed Date,Last Printed Time.

-- 
As ever,
.\\artin

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