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Recovering Deleted Files on ReiserFS3?

Posted by Cliff on from the who-said-unix-doesn't-need-an-undelete dept.

DarkSarin asks: "I have a rather serious problem: I managed to accidentally delete some files (rather important ones at that!) while trying to back them up to cd (I was using a GUI burning software that will remain nameless for now). How do you recover accidentally deleted files in Reiserfs? This thread (started by me) indicates that you can't recover them. Note that I had found a way to rebuild the tree, but that didn't work. It seems odd to me that you wouldn't be able to recover accidental deletions, but that really does seem to be the case. Help? Please?"

3 of 126 comments (clear)

  1. Try this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I really don't understand how this was done. None the less you CAN recover from this. Here's a little tutorial I found. I Highly suggest doing the backup first!!! :

    If you're really really desperate, you can do what I did a few weeks ago. In my \
    case, fsck didn't recover the partition either, indeed it crashed. So here's what's \
    I did from the beginning of what I think fixed it:

    1) reiserfsck --rebuild-tree
    2) mount
    3) reiserfsck -S
    4) debugreiserfs to get metadata for Vitaly
    5) mount
    6) mount again

    I'm not sure why this happened, but after the second mount, the partition was not \
    recognizeable as ReiserFS anymore. I suspect it had to do with a few really huge \
    files that were originally on the partition that reisefsck -S tried to recover. In \
    doing so it probably hosed lots of stuff. Now, it was as simple as

    7) reiserfsck --rebuild-tree

    And I had most of my data linked under lost+found! Took me a few hours to sort \
    through it all but I got back most of what I cared about. Maybe if you use the new \
    pre8 fsck you won't need to jump through these hoops. Since the potential for data \
    destruction is high here, I wouldn't blame you for not trying. And yes, this all \
    happened by trial and error ::-)

    This might help too :
    http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=reiserfs&m=1048613 18421306&w=2.

    Good luck!

  2. Ask Namesys by cornice · · Score: 4, Informative

    Pay Namesys $25. They wrote ReiserFS so they should know. You'll be getting really great support and helping those who wrote your file system. Look here:

    http://www.namesys.com/support.html

  3. Re:Good luck... by SteveOU · · Score: 4, Informative

    I will point out that the filesystems included in Novell's Netware product did include a deletion-recovery tool, accessible via the salvage command. My understanding was that Netware would not permantently delete a file until that disk space was needed for active data or until a timeout period expired.

    Damned handy tool, too. We had IBM's TSM for our major backup operations, but for those "oops" moments, salvage was sure handy. I hope that the new Novell might consider implementing those features on existing linux filesystems, or at least contribute native linux implemenations of their filesystems.