Comments on: undelete text files on Linux ext3 partition

By: M@

M@ — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 05:07:15 +0000

worked like a charm–if it weren’t several hours of work I had nearly lost I might have even called it fun!

Thank you so much.

By: Jack

Jack — Fri, 22 May 2009 06:31:09 +0000

Yes this definitely worked. I used it to find some c code I accidently deleted. It left out the curly braces in some places ( {} ) but other than that I was able to fine the text and get back to coding.

Thanks.

By: kenquad

kenquad — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:43:56 +0000

Thank you for posting this. This was exactly what I needed to recover a lost and VERY important HSQLDB file. I would like to add the suggestion that, for very large files (mine was over 11GB) the split command is helpful for breaking it down into manageable chunks. Thanks again!

By: Jeff

Jeff — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:31:10 +0000

O. M. G. Thank you so much.

I accidentally RM’ed 3 days of hardcore dev work. This was the only recovery method (for ext3) which got it back.

Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you !

By: Jurann

Jurann — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 10:00:26 +0000

No dice. =/ I guess that since I was working directly on a busy webserver that my Perl files just went *poof!* amidst the massive amount of activity… I’ve spent hours now just trying to grep through fs dumps of various sorts onto my backup partition and can’t find a trace of my code. =/ About 15 minutes from the time I accidentally nuked a maintenance directory of Perl scripts, I found your article – too late I guess. Can’t stress that this needs to get done IMMEDIATELY if you’re on a busy server…

By: Justin

Justin — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 03:36:24 +0000

You wouldn’t happen to know of a way to recover files from the resulting text file? I accidentally deleted a whole bunch of mp3s and was wondering if you know of any recovery programs (windows probably) that will let you look at a text file?

By: Allan C

Allan C — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 23:07:28 +0000

Oh, this post has really SAVED me! Thank you.
I stayed up pretty late last night writing a perl script that does some cool text processing on a web log. The script gives some fancy reports like how often a given user returns to your site and other statistics.
I had just finished it, and set up a cronjob to run it daily.

I needed to delete an extraneous file, and intended to re-run the perl script, but what I typed was:
rm Visits..html proclog.pl full carhart-access_log

There should have been a semicolon there.
I deleted my perl script (proclog.pl) and my log file (carhart-access_log) all at once!

The log file was easy enough to get back, since apache was still running and so it still had a handle to the file. The perl script however — Hours and Hours of blood, sweat, and tears, was _gone_.

I poked around online, and found your post. So I mounted my Windoze box’s C Drive, executed:
strings /dev/hds1 > /var/tmp/mnt/bigfkenfile

and waited…. The resulting file is 18GB on my Windoze box (which is almost full now). I’m still waiting, but I just grepped for one line from my perl script, and FOUND IT! I am very optimistic now, and have you to thank.

By: è°è¯´è¯¯å Ext3ä¸çæä»¶ä¸å®æ¾ä¸å

è°è¯´è¯¯å Ext3ä¸çæä»¶ä¸å®æ¾ä¸å — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 11:58:34 +0000

[...] 他在这里： http://www.csummers.org/index.php/2005/12/20/undelete-text-files-on-linux-ext3-partition/ 他的开头是这么写的 Every once in a while I do something really, really stupid. Like, say, [...]

By: Simon

Simon — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 10:33:11 +0000

Thanks for this article to help me find my important files back. I wanna quote this article to my blog. And translate to chinese language. Sure I will put the address of this article in as well. If there has any problem, pls let me know.
Thank you for the help again.

By: Teal

Teal — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 03:34:26 +0000

wow… what a help… i just deleted my entire ~/www/ directory, while trying to back it up of all things! i have backups of the pictures, and most of the web content, but a cgi script i’ve been working on for about 10 hours or more was part of the loss. using grep, it seems like it’s all there, but i don’t have time to fix it tonight. thanks and you’re a complete lifesaver!!