Recovering deleted files

[Dotan Cohen]

On 30/09/06, claydoh <claydoh at claydoh.com> wrote:
> On Saturday 30 September 2006 12:20 pm, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> > I'm not sure what I did, but all the files in my
> > /home/dotancohen/Photos directory are gone. The directory in question
> > is on a seperate disk partition from the rest of the system. What
> > tools can I use to recover the files?
> >
> > It is an ext3 filesystem. As soon as I discovered the error I stopped
> > using it, but it is still mounted. I'm on the latest up-to-date
> > Kubuntu.
> >
> > Thanks in advance.
> >
> > Dotan Cohen
> > http://what-is-what.com
>
> Recovering files on ext3 is very difficult and not usually worth the effort.
> BUT I have had some success once using a set of tools called testdisk to
> recover *some* images from a hard drive:
> http://packages.ubuntu.com/dapper/admin/testdisk
>
> It contains a tool called photorec that is used specifically to recover image
> files.
>
> Check out these pages for some info:
> http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec and
> http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Thank you, PhotoRec did the job.

Well, it _did_ do the job, and then ten minutes later the photos were
gone again. I rebooted and ran the program again- it says that it
finds ~4000 files (that's about right), and when I exit and open Konqi
they are not there.

I don't know why, but I got a stupid idea to remount the partition to
another mount point- and it worked... The pictures show up in the new
mount point. I don't know why I thought of that, and I don't know why
it worked.

I just backed everything up, but I'd still like to know what could be
the cause of the files disappearing. I'm a little uneasy with things
now, lest I should lose more data.

Dotan Cohen
http://gmail-com.com