Converting ext3 to ext4 resulting in loss of data?

[Tyler J. Wagner]

On Tuesday 10 Aug 2010 15:38:15 James Hogarth wrote:
> 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 ^^

One correction: file metadata (dates, permissions, ownership, etc) are stored 
in the inode (the filesystem table). File names are stored in each directory, 
not the inode table. It may be possible to recover the directories, and 
therefore a list of names, but there is still no way to associate those names 
with the recovered files.

This is why recovering files from raw disk carving (one name for the technique 
photorec uses) doesn't recover names.

Regards,
Tyler


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