Ok, I am not sure if this is the right place for this post.

I was testing a backup script I wrote for my system. It is using mirrordir.
I have two 120GB drives (data and backup). I am backing up the Data drive to the Backup drive. [I know, I spent a lot of time in the naming.]

Now, here is the issue. I was testing to see if I could get mirrordir to work properly. However on the backup drive, I remove files to see if mirrordir would copy them from the data drive. Now the files are gone. It is by design this happened.

Is there any way to recover the files? They are very important...
Both drives are ext3 system.
???

hi there,
click me. check post number 5.
regards,
slackie1000

The short answer is no. ext3 zeroes out the inodes when it deletes files. You can try grepping through the drive for text in your files or something.

Wow, that is a wonderful article but that does not address my situation however.
I don't see a referance for ext3 file system. Several of the links are not working.
After some searching, I have found a few ISOs I am going to try.

Oh dear. [huff] Well, are there any tools you know of that may help?

What is a better file system out of all that one can choose? ext2,3, reiserfs, etc...?

well, thanks to all who have posted. I know now to make backups of backups.
slackie1000, thanks for the great article. I did learn from it.

spooon, thanks for letting me know.