Hi,

i have deleted my complete home (/home/username) while deleting one profile which was sharing same home folder with my home. This has been done under root. After doing that i switched off the machine and hard disk was removed to avoid any overwriting. I have tried with two professional data recovery companies, they are not able to recover it. I am having HP Workstation xw8200 with RedHat EL3. I will really be very thankful if some body can help me in this.

Regards
Manish.

If you are using ext3, it has an anti-file-recovery mechanism. Files are deleted for good.

From the ext3 FAQ ( http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/proj.../ext3-faq.html ):
Try reading http://linux.sys-con.com/read/117909.htm

The two professional data recovery companies didn't fail without a reason.

You could create a copy of the disk using 'dd' and parse the created file for certain known filetypes (based on specific file headers or tail information) but this is extremely painfull and takes a lot time. If you want to get back images or fonts, then it could work. To retrieve textfiles you will have to read your way through the dd file. For complex binary files like office documents it will be a horrible task. You could write a few programs to parse the contents based on what you are looking for, if the value of the contents is worth the effort. I don't think that there is any existing single application that does it all, just the way you want it to be.

Sharing home directories is not a good idea, as it seems.

Linux Archive

Hi,

Thank you for both of the replies.
Would you recommend any company for doing this task.

Regards
Manish

I cannot recommend any company that will write a custom program to search the disk for whatever file types you lost. What you need to understand is that most of your data is gone for good, even though, at great expense, you might recover a few bits.

I have to say that I have had some success with photorec (even with ext3), which can be found on the internet for free. It is very likely that larger files (especially video) will have been badly mangled but pictures and text documents should have survived. You need to bear in mind that recovery can be quite time consuming: not only does the program take time to scan your drive, everything will be renamed in the process as a format does not destroy data so much as their meta-data (i.e. file names and the like) so you'll need to check and sort the results manually.