Why didn’t I think of that?
Monday, May 12th, 2008
Archive for May, 2008
Data Recovery from ext3 partitions
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008I found this great tool last week called ext3grep. It can help you recover deleted files from an ext3 formatted partitions which is quite amazing considering the ext3 FAQ states:
Q: How can I recover (undelete) deleted files from my ext3 partition?
Actually, you can’t! This is what one of the developers, Andreas Dilger, said about it:
In order to ensure that ext3 can safely resume an unlink after a crash, it actually zeros out the block pointers in the inode, whereas ext2 just marks these blocks as unused in the block bitmaps and marks the inode as “deleted” and leaves the block pointers alone.
Your only hope is to “grep” for parts of your files that have been deleted and hope for the best.
Anyway, I found a good tutorial by Carlo Wood, and made good use of this tool.
So, bamed, why did you need a tool to recover deleted files from ext3?
I choose not to answer that question except to say look before you rm -rf ./*.