Could anyone point me to info on how to recover a deleted directory? I have modified files for a few days since the last backup and I have done nothing on the machine since so the files should still all be there.

The file system is ext4 and what I have done was:
thinking that would remove the backup files from mydir and its subdirectories but
is gone

Thank you for your help.

I have found is part of the distro and I am going to try it and report the result.

Never use the -rf with rm unless you are sure of the outcome.

Good luck with extundelete, I've never heard of it, let us know how it goes.

This should do what you wanted to do
(Always safer to go into the directory to do deletions.)

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I edit many files in many directories and it is time-consuming to do from each directory, I think it would be better to make a bash script (without using "f") that does the job and invoke it every time I need to remove those backups. The problem is in typing many times the same thing and making a typo which is only discovered after having pressed "Enter", the danger seems to be almost the same to me if I accidentally type "extundelete" recovered many files, there was probably close to 20 files that had been changed since the last backup and I could not remember the filename of some of them, I still have to compare those recovered to those from the backup to find which had been changed, a few known changed files were recovered, one important file was recovered while another important file just created (no backup) is missing, I anticipate it has been overwritten by a process because it took me a few minutes to realise what I had done before I logged out and back in as another user to protect the partition. "extundelete" put all the files recovered in a "lost-and-found" sub-directory with all the correct file-names.

I then tried "foremost" to try to recover the missing new file but it did not recover much and it was mostly garbage, "foremost" has a list of mime types of files it is able to recover, text files not being one of them and all my files were text files, I tried the "htm" option with no better result.

I then tried "scalpel" which recovered many more files than the other 2 but no text files, the recovered files are given a new incremental numeric name which means you need to display each to find what it is. There are occasionally many copies of the same file, all small files, something I cannot explain

I read it may be possible to recover files using "dd", is there anyone who could advise on this? I have never used it and I found the man pages never give enough information for my level of experience. I know the name of the missing file and the day it has been created if that could be of any help

Hi,

if you don't want the backup files you should disable their creation. What text editor are you using?

Or remove them with find. Eg to just list the files
Then once you are sure these are the files you want to delete, you can delete them with:
Evo2.

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What is really time consuming: to restore your files.
As it was mentioned if you want to remove a lot of files/dirs, first just collect them into a file (line by line), check the content carefully and finally insert an rm at the beginning of the lines in that file and execute that as a script.

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configure your editor to put this backup files somewhere else
or turn this feature off

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@rblampain
Thanks for the feedback about extundelete.

The use of dd is for copying a disk block by block, not file by file.
I think what you may have read was about making a backup of your disk, & then working on that backup, not the actual disk.

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I used "gedit".

I introduced a mistake in my backup procedure, I deleted the backup files (*~) before making the real backup, I should do this after. I do not really want to disable the option.

I work as 7 different users on this testing machine and need only to make a backup after having worked as that user which could be months apart, hence a usual daily backup is not really what I need.

Thanks to fatmac, evo2, pan64 and a4z, having a script on those lines is precisely what I need.

What I found on the Internet: recovering a deleted directory and its files is technically impossible, only recovering files is possible and, in practice, many of those files may not be from the deleted directory which may make the job tedious especially if the recovery tool gives the files a different and incremental name.