[SOLVED] Help! Accidental Deletion need to recover from loss :(

heberg21 · 06-19-2010, 08:06 AM

Hello,

I accidentally deleted all the files from file system in my hard drive (thankfully not my /home since it resided on a separate hdd). I did this from another system while I had connected that hdd to look at some files since my system was not booting correctly. The problem is that I deleted everything (manually while I was in nautilus) including the .Trash file. I have not formatted this drive so the partition table remains the same, nor have I written anything to it since the deletion, and, this drive is using ext4. What is the best way to restore this drive to how it was (say yesterday at 4:30PM)? (I have a lot of programs installed and I have been upgrading Ubuntu there since 9.04 to now 10.04). If I am not mistaken when data is deleted in ext4 it is simply flagged as usable space, and if that is so, is it possible to just simply unflag this data to get every file back the way it was yesterday at 4:30PM?

Also, I have looked the partition (sdd1) for this drive on Gparted and shows all the used space (which 91.92GB).

Please help. Thanks.

Mohtek · 06-19-2010, 08:16 AM

It might be easier to just reinstall, since your /home files are safe, its not quite as painful. It may save you a lot of time and effort over manually recovering the data.

{BBI}Nexus{BBI} · 06-19-2010, 08:19 AM

The time and effort it will take to try to recover your partition, it would be simpler to just install 10.04. There's no telling if the recovered partition won't be corrupt in some way. The important data is on your /home drive so it's only programs that need reinstalling. If you decide to reinstall, once you have all your programs added, use Synaptic Package manager to produce a script of installed programs. If you ever need to reinstall again you can use the script to install all the programs you use without having to go through the package list marking them individually.

heberg21 · 06-19-2010, 08:23 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by {BBI}Nexus{BBI}

The time and effort it will take to try to recover your partition, it would be simpler to just install 10.04. There's no telling if the recovered partition won't be corrupt in some way. The important data is on your /home drive so it's only programs that need reinstalling. If you decide to reinstall, once you have all your programs added, use Synaptic Package manager to produce a script of installed programs. If you ever need to reinstall again you can use the script to install all the programs you use without having to go through the package list marking them individually.

Would it be too hard to at least recover a file that would have a list of all programs I had installed?

{BBI}Nexus{BBI} · 06-19-2010, 08:28 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by heberg21

Would it be too hard to at least recover a file that would have a list of all programs I had installed?

There may be a database of all installed packages produced and used by the system (sorry I don't know what it would be called) that you might be able to recover. The one I referred to is user generated and would be saved to your /home/username folder.