I was block selecting a bunch of files for house-cleaning deletion and pressed the red X (delete) in Konqueror to get rid of them, not knowing i accidentally had selected at least one directory in amongst them. When the dialogue came up it said it was deleting 66 directories and i immediately hit CANCEL but the damage was done. I'm using ext3. I've googled for recovery tools, but everything seems to indicate i'm pretty well screwed. I had 3GB worth of music and who knows what else. Don't tell me i should have had backups. The irony is that i was cleaning up my FS a bit so i could do a backup!!!. IS THERE ANY WAY TO GET MY POOR DATA BACK? :-(

It may take a while, but you could always rerip the CDs. There are tools that can automate the tagging using an internet CD database.

Quote: Original post by Michalson
It may take a while, but you could always rerip the CDs. There are tools that can automate the tagging using an internet CD database.

Yeah, too bad they were downloaded.

Quote: Original post by Azrioc

Quote: Original post by Michalson
It may take a while, but you could always rerip the CDs. There are tools that can automate the tagging using an internet CD database.

Yeah, too bad they were downloaded.

Don't be so quick to judge. I highly doubt a person would so stupid as to post their exploits in stealing intellectual property on a board filled with people who make their living or plan to make their living on that kind of property. That's like walking into a showroom and saying you're a car thief. You'd have to be braindead to do something like that.

You have to lose at least one disk before you learn to actually make actual back-ups, for real.

No, I know of no tool to restore unlinked ext3 files. Re-ripping is the only way. 3 GB of data at 256 kbit is maybe 25 albums; that should be doable in a day or so. Sucks to lose it -- hopefully that backup will finally be made!

Quote: Original post by Michalson

Quote: Original post by Azrioc

Quote: Original post by Michalson
It may take a while, but you could always rerip the CDs. There are tools that can automate the tagging using an internet CD database.

Yeah, too bad they were downloaded.

Don't be so quick to judge. I highly doubt a person would so stupid as to post their exploits in stealing intellectual property on a board filled with people who make their living or plan to make their living on that kind of property. That's like walking into a showroom and saying you're a car thief. You'd have to be braindead to do something like that.

yeah well I was gonna post some links for ext3 recovery tools that I know but now that you put it that way all I'll say you need to work on your googling skills!
I've personally been able to recover 99% of a couple of drives I've totally formatted although for a 200GB drive which I did it on took about 7+hrs.

Quote: Original post by Michalson
That's like walking into a showroom and saying you're a car thief. You'd have to be braindead to do something like that.

What we have here might be closer to walking into a showroom and asking the attendant about hotwiring methods. But your point still stands.

There are undelete programs for ext2 but apparently such methods don't work with ext3 due to journalling. You're data is gone. Re-rip it.

Or, if you're a masochist, you could try hacking through the raw drive data with dd or something:

Quote:
Q: How can I recover (undelete) deleted files from my ext3 partition?

A: Actually, you can't! This is what one of the developers, Andreas Dilger, said about it:

In order to ensure that ext3 can safely resume an unlink after a crash, it actually zeros out the block pointers in the inode, whereas ext2 just marks these blocks as unused in the block bitmaps and marks he inode as 'deleted' and leaves the block pointers alone. Your only hope is to 'grep' for parts of your files that have been deleted and hope for the best.

For the future, alias rm to mv /trash and create a daemon that routinely (say, once a week) empties out that directory. However, you were using Konquerer, so this doesn't really matter. But if you were using the command line, this (or something like it) would be a good idea.

Very sorry, i should have mentioned:

Yes, my entire music collection is legit. Most of it is ripped CDs that i legally own, but a good portion of it (but not most of it) are items i legally downloaded from various sources. I feel that if artists are good enough for me to listen to their music, i i owe them the money for the CD. It's also my way of supporting artists i like since most of the artists i like are from small-time independent labels, which i am happy to support financially. Credit where credit is due, i say. That, and in the case of disaster (like this) i always have the hard copies :-)

@daveangel:

I've tried googling and looking up different forum searches but i'm not turning up much besides ext2 recovery tools (which i've tried and don't work). If you've actually recovered anything from an ext3 partition, i'm glad to hear it can be done. Would you be willing to share the info? please? I've got untold hours of CD re-ripping staring me in the face!

@BitBlt

Quote: For the future, alias rm to mv /trash and create a daemon that routinely (say, once a week) empties out that directory. However, you were using Konquerer, so this doesn't really matter. But if you were using the command line, this (or something like it) would be a good idea.

That's a good idea. How would i put that into .bashrc as an alias? Particularly, how to transplant the filename in the command line?

i can't just say:

alias rm="mv"




Thanks for the help guys. I didn't mean to turn this into illegal music discussion by not prefacing my original message with my own legality.

[Edited by - leiavoia on June 29, 2004 11:32:15 PM]

Quote: Original post by leiavoia

Quote: For the future, alias rm to mv /trash and create a daemon that routinely (say, once a week) empties out that directory. However, you were using Konquerer, so this doesn't really matter. But if you were using the command line, this (or something like it) would be a good idea.

That's a good idea. How would i put that into .bashrc as an alias? Particularly, how to transplant the filename in the command line?

i can't just say:

alias rm="mv"

You're right, there's no way to invert the second argument to the first. But you can with functions. Just add the following to .bashrc

function rm{    mv $1 /trash}