Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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. Stop!!! by zulux · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Take the filesystem offline. NOW!

    Then use dd to copy the partition to another partion/disk. Then mess with the copy.

    A lot of silesystems do a good job at keeping files and their blocks in order. I've had luck with *BSD file-system by grepping for somthing at the begining of the file and grabbing a big chunk of data afterwords. This works great for MS Office Documents, JPEG or anthing that begins with a known preamble.

    This may not work for your filesystem.

    --

    Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.

  2. Suddenly... by Anonvmous+Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...every Windows user looks at that Recycle Bin shortcut on their desktop and smiles.

    (No, that's not really a troll. Human error happens.)

  3. 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!