"Norton Utilities" for ubuntu

[Amedee Van Gasse (ubuntu)]

mark c. miller schreef:

> I am running Ubuntu 9.04.  The file I "lost" was and Open Office.org 
> Writer file.  I had a file called Latin 11.odt.  For some reason, I 
> decided to name another file "latin11.odt".  When the dialogue box told 
> me that there was a file with that name already, I did the dumb thing and 
> checked "yes" to over-write.  Now I have a file of greek roots misnamed 
> as latin11.  I'd like to recover the original latin11 file if I can.  I'd 
> hoped for some kind of a back-up file created by OOo, but couldn't find 
> one.  I looked at debugfs, but I'm not smart enough to figure it out -- 
> I'm really new at this.
> 
> Any tricks you've got up your sleeve will be appreciated.


You didn't delete a file, but you have overwritten it.
In short, you're screwed.

If this was the age of MS-DOS and you had Norton Utilities, you would
still have been screwed. Norton could undelete files, but it couldn't
recover overwritten files.

I suppose you don't have a scanning transmission electron microscope?

To quote the Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_recovery#Recovering_overwritten_data

Recovering overwritten data
See also: Data erasure

When data have been physically overwritten on a hard disk it is
generally assumed that the previous data are no longer possible to
recover. In 1996, Peter Gutmann, a respected computer scientist,
presented a paper that suggested overwritten data could be recovered
through the use of Scanning transmission electron microscopy.[4] In
2001, he presented another paper on a similar topic.[5] Substantial
criticism has followed, primarily dealing with the lack of any concrete
examples of significant amounts of overwritten data being
recovered.[6][7] To guard against this type of data recovery, he and
Colin Plumb designed the Gutmann method, which is used by several disk
scrubbing software packages.

Although Gutmann's theory may be correct, there's no practical evidence
that overwritten data can be recovered. Moreover, there are good reasons
to think that it cannot.[8]

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