HOWTO recover deleted files on an ext3 file system
It happens to everyone sooner or later: a split second after you hit Enter you realize your mistake, but it’s too late; you just deleted a valuable file or directory for which no backup exists. Or maybe you have a backup, but it’s a month old… and in shock you see the past month flash before your eyes as you realize in pain what you’ll have to do all over again…
Fortunately, you remember that files are never really deleted, at most overwritten by new content. So, you remount the disk read-only as fast as possible. But now?
If you Google for “undelete ext3”, almost every article you find will be users asking if it’s possible and the answer is every time: no.
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However, this is utter nonsense. All information is still there, also the block pointers. It is just slightly less likely that those are still there (than on ext2), since they have to be recovered from the journal. On top of that, the meta data is less coherently related to the real data so that heuristic algorithms are needed to find things back.
“It happens to everyone sooner or later: a split second after you hit Enter you realize your mistake, but it’s too late; you just deleted a valuable file or directory for which no backup exists. Or maybe you have a backup, but it’s a month old… and in shock you see the past month flash before your eyes as you realize in pain what you’ll have to do all over again…”
This is why all important personal files should be stored using version control, either in the filesystem or through an application. A month’s worth of work is too important to risk on 1 keystroke :)