[Gllug] Undelete...?

[Ian Norton]

On Thu, Feb 05, 2004 at 02:30:31PM +0000, Jason Clifford wrote:
> On Thu, 5 Feb 2004, Kristian Davies wrote:
> 
> > I had a directory with a couple of files starting with "?blah"
> > So like a Burk I deleted them with "rm -fr ?*" ... Don't laugh!
> > 
> > Well anyway, in that directory was a script I use all the time, which I
> > would rather no rewrite.
> > 
> > Is there a way of getting my file back?
> > 
> > I realise this is a total newb question, but I find it hard to believe there
> > is no way of recovering a file which has not been overwritten.
> 
> That's because you are not thinking of your PC as a multi-user system.
> 
> True multi-user multitasking systems don't really do undelete as it cannot 
> be reliable with lots of users/processes able to write to the disk.
> 
> If you are lucky the data will still be on the disk and wont have been 
> overwritten. If that's the case you can remount the device read only and 
> try some of the methods listed in the Undelete howtos - generally using 
> the debugfs tool.
> 
> Note that these probably wont work on a journaling filesystem like ext3 
> however if you have ext3 you can mount it as ext2 which *might* work.
> 
> If you are particularly desperate you can open the filesystem as a file 
> and search for some identifying text. A small script may be located solely 
> in a single inode in which case you'll be able to copy and paste to 
> recover it.
> 
> Larger files will almost certainly be spread across the disk making it far 
> more challenging to recover them.
> 
> Jason Clifford
> -- 

One Suggestion I was considering for a large system was for everyone (except
root) i would make a wrapper called 'rm' that would simply move files into a
temporary place ( ie, ~/var/tmp/recycle/user/day-time/ ) after 24hrs the
contents of these are deleted, else the user can run 'empty' or somthing and
delete them straight away.

a little bit 'windows95' but i think that on a user with people new to
unix/linux it might be helpful for them.

Ian

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