How to fully recover deleted files on ext3 Debian
Linux partition
In order to recover fully data by mistake or on purpose deleted on
Debian GNU/Linux there is a tool called
ext3grep which is
able to completely recover data by innodes.
Recovering the deleted files data is very easy and can be done via
some livecd after installing the ext3grep tool.
In my case I used the
Back Track Linux distribution to
recover my data. Recovery is still in process and it appears all or
at least most of my data is about to be recovered.
For the recovery procedure all necessary is an external partition
in ext3 or ext3 where the recovered data from the ext3 device can
be stored.
My partition was about 20GB and since I had no external hard dive
to store the data to I used the
sshfs to mount remotely a
hard drive via the networking using the
sshfs program to
make the ssh mount for more see my previous post
Howto mount remote server ssh filesystem using sshfs
The
Backtrack livecd linux security distribution is missing
the
ext3grep tool thus I had to first install the tool after
booting the livecd on the notebook to succeed in that it was
necessary to install the
e2fslibs-dev package through the
command:
debian:~# apt-get install e2fslibs-dev
Further on I've downloaded the latest version of the ext3grep and
untarred the archive and compiled it with the commands:
debian:~# ./configure && make && make
install
Then I used the simple commands:
debian:~# cd /mnt/res
debian:~# ext3grep --restore-all /dev/sda8
to launch the recovery.
Where in the above commands
/mnt/res is the mountpoint
location where I wanted to have all my data recovered and the
/dev/sda8 is the device from which I wanted to recover my
data.
It takes a bit long until the recovery is completed and with 20
gigabytes of data about 5, 6 hours might be necessary for the data
to be recovered but the main point is it recovers.