So, I’m here cleaning various partitions on my laptop. I decided that my 500GB drive needs some re-arranging.
My laptop has a 500GB drive, partitioned out to boot however many OS’s I have on it at a given time (4 right now) as well as stashes for documents, etc shared between each OS, and my home directory as used in Linux.
Our file server (Alyssa-Server) has over 2TB of drives, 2 250GB, a 640GB and a 1TB. The 250’s are mirroring each other, the 640 is for program installers, and the TB is for anime/movies. I may move my music there too.
So, since I have all this room just a Ethernet cable away, it makes sense to move the stuff I want to save off to the server (I have a share just for backups) to get it out of my way then bring it back in after I’m done massaging the partitions on Lazarus to make room to inflict even more Linux on her. (Girl laptop, guy name…read the post.)
However, in the process of moving back I nuked a directory by mistake. Oh shit, the server is running that on ext3, and EVERYONE knows that it’s IMPOSSIBLE to undelete on ext3.
Well, they better tell Carlo Wood his program is “unpossible” then. Mr. Wood (no relation) has written ext3grep, a program that makes recovering your nuked files possible.
It’s not for the weak. Let’s face it, playing with filesystems involves manly code, doing manly things, and it frequently likes to shoot users. I had to edit some source code, but it wasn’t bad.
My biggest issue was that no matter what I did, I couldn’t get ext3grep to ONLY recover files deleted after a certain date/time. I ended up editing the stage2 file (RTFM and you will know, Gwasshoppaw) to include only the directories I wanted back. It looks like someone has submitted a patch to exclude files not matching a given path.
It will take time to run. The partition I was playing with was 200GB large, and it took time to scan. However, once it’s done, it has stage files that it uses to work with.
You can download the source from the Google Group.
As a bonus, Gentoo types can “emerge ext3grep -av” though the ebuild is 1 revision behind; you may be better off just getting the source and compiling it without using Portage.
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