Have you ever accidentally deleted files on the command line (dos, windows, or linux)? Well, I have - many times. Luckily, I was able to restore the files I deleted using an undelete tool. Note we’re not talking about delete to trash bin / recycle bin here. I’m referring to a real delete.Anyway… It appears that I ran out of luck when I accidentally deleted files on my Linux platform. My filesystem is an ext3 filesystem. I tried searching for undelete tools for ext3 but I only found undelete tools for ext2. I searched and searched and searched - to no avail. Guess what I found?

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 the 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.

More EXT3 FAQs here

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