In my infinite wisdom I decided to re-arrange my files today.
Part of this was moving my work files into my work folder in my home directory. That went fine.
Then I decided to delete another folder in that same directory.
Then the phone rang. I picked it up, pressed shift-delete, got the vague sense that something looked wrong, and clicked the confirm.
I just deleted all my work for the past 2 years.
I managed to click cancel before it was finished, but that didn't seem to do anything.

I've looked into recovering it, but it's on an Ext3fs, which apparently makes recovery impossible.

I'm not entirely out of luck, I've still got backups, but most of them are a couple months old.

Anyone have any ideas, besides "backup more often" .

sorry mate you're stuffed.

Undeletion doesn't appear to be an option, but there is one less than practical solution. You can view the raw data with a hexeditor. One hexeditor that I use is hexedit. My command would be:
hexedit /dev/hdX

You could search for your most important data if you can recall any text within it. You may not get everything if the files are large though, because large files are split into smaller chunks on the disk.

Example of a lost file:
>To: gnu1@gnu.com
>From: gnu2@gnu.com
>Subject: Hi
>Message:
>Whenever I try this command apt-get install ultracool_personality
>I always get the error "Access Denied"

I would probably search for this file using the string "ultracool_personality".

Also, another tool you might try is grep.