"Norton Utilities" for ubuntu

[Mark Williams]

mark c. miller wrote:
> On Wed, 27 May 2009 08:22:23 +0100, Mark Williams wrote:
> 
>> Leonard Chatagnier wrote:
>>> --- On Tue, 5/26/09, Steve Reilly <sfreilly at roadrunner.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> From: Steve Reilly <sfreilly at roadrunner.com> Subject: Re: "Norton
>>>> Utilities" for ubuntu To: "Ubuntu user technical support, not for
>>>> general discussions" <ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com> Date: Tuesday,
>>>> May 26, 2009, 8:45 PM
>>>> eyore15 User wrote:
>>>>> I had occasion today to over-write a file I really
>>>> needed.  I thought how
>>>>> convenient it would be to have file recovery utility
>>>> like Norton Rescue.
>>>>> I'm pretty sure there is something out there, I just
>>>> don't know what to
>>>>> call it.  Ideally it would be in the Synaptic
>>>> repositories.
>>>>> Can you offer me any hope?
>> Can you add any detail about type of file, format of drive, what you
>> have overwritten it with?
>> debugfs is OK & can undelete a deleted file, if it's still there. If you
>> just shortened a text file & haven't written to the disk again you're
>> probably OK too.
>> You could check the trash & be sure you didn't delete it before the
>> overwrite :)
>> If you completely wrote data over it, you need a foren$ic data service
>> to get data from the fringes of the magnetic domains (ie you're screwed
>> unless it's REALLY valuable). Norton can't do this one either. As
>> previously stated, backups are wonderful - some apps will automatically
>> create one, not many these days though, check for $filename & .bak. You
>> can see, here, how useful some idea of exactly what we're discussing
>> would make a lot of sense...
>>
>> Mark
> 
> 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.
> 
> mcm

No, that's difficult; OO writes to a small header (XML iirc) with a 
block of compressed data embedded in it, which is the bit you need; so 
you will now have the wrong bit of data inside the same-size header, on 
(probably) the same bit of your hard drive. So all you could possibly 
get is, effectively, the last half of a zip file, if the greek bit was 
smaller than the original. If you were incredibly lucky something else 
might have overwritten part of it, and a straight text file might have 
enough survive to be worth hunting for.

The word 'buggered' has, I'm sure, some suitable latin roots - sorry!

You _might_ find a bit of temporary file somewhere; if you haven't used 
it [much] since, the following sequence will take _hours_ to run & you 
would want to have a flash drive or similar to take the copy;

 >mount
& look where your /home/ is mounted; I will assume /dev/sda1 for the 
following:

Boot off a CD, open a terminal again:

 >cat /dev/sda1 | strings | grep -A 30 -B 30 
distinctive_latin_word_that_you_know_was_there

(all one line - cat sends the whole drive, via a filter for text only, 
to a search for a word..)

If you find a match, grep -A x -B y distinctive_latin_word
gets you y lines before & x lines after it. Adding a '>save.file' at the 
end keeps a copy...

If it's worth that much effort, good hunting!

Mark