I have my linux home directory shared out to my xp machine and was experimenting with a few things and instead of deleting the link from 'docs and settings' to the linux home directory I deleted the contents the link pointed to - some files in my linux home directory. I immediately unmounted the drive and ran debugfs and lsdel but it shows 0 inodes being deleted but the files are indeed gone.

The file system is ext3 and home is on its own partition. Not all of /home/user is gone.. just a few important directories. .thunderbird being one.

Any ideas? Does samba do something strange with it like put it in a recycle bin somewhere? I dont remember setting anything like that up in samba.

I immediately unmounted the drive and ran debugfs and lsdel but it shows 0 inodes being deleted but the files are indeed gone.
Indeed they are. Consider the files gone and irrecoverable. If you still want to try, there's the forensics approach. Check any major "undelete" thread for steps. Understand beforehand recovery will be costly as in learning curve and invested time and comes with no guarantee wrt (partial) results whatsoever. You do make backups, right?..


The file system is ext3 and home is on its own partition. Not all of /home/user is gone.. just a few important directories. .thunderbird being one.
Ext3 actually thwarts recovery but that's in the gory details.


Does samba do something strange with it like put it in a recycle bin somewhere?
No, AFAIK it doesn't. If you want a thrashcan you could try and LD_PRELOAD something like http://freshmeat.net/projects/libtrash/.

Thanks for the reply. Just so happens I did make a backup a few weeks ago of the more important data when I rearranged some partitions and was able to get it back for the most part.

I did a little looking around and found a program called ext3rminator which automates what you just sugested, although its still experimental. It did in fact work and got some info recovered before the program crashed on me. If it could get past a certain spot it would get more back I bet - I didnt patch it to the newest version so that might of helped. Was suprised to find some files I deleted months ago restored.

Incase anyone interest heres a link to the download area:
http://web.glandium.org/debian/repository/experimental/

U might be interested in this

http://www.data-recovery-software.ne...Recovery.shtml

Works from windows and is free

Here's an article that I wrote that should save you some headaches in the future

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...in-tip-723004/