[wellylug] [OT] Sarge approaching release

[jumbophut]

On Sat, 04 Sep 2004 16:13:15 +1200, Enkidu wrote:

> I don't miss 'recover'. I don't seem to have it on my system if that
> is its name. Or is it a fs utility? Anyway, I decided a long time ago
> that if I deleted a file and I didn't have a backup, it was gone. It's
> caused me problems at times, sure. But I don't want to get to rely on
> fs level recovery. That's for the million dollar files, and I don't
> have too many of them, and in any case a million dollar file better be
> backed up *AND* the backup checked or someone's out of a job, eh?

My problem was that I had used ext2 previously, and so thought I could
rely on 'recover' to undelete accidentally rm'd files immediately
after making the mistake.  The fact that people make a big deal about
how ext3 filesystems can work with ext2 tools reinforced this
perception.

Now that I know ext3 is actually more different from ext2 than I
thought, I'm less cavalier at the command line, and I keep more
regular backups.

I bet I'm not the only person who didn't know that 'recover' and its
ilk, which work perfectly on ext2, don't work on ext3, even though
ext3 is frequently characterised as just ext2+journal.

You can read the technical explanation here:
<http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/projects/FAQs/ext3-faq.html>

Quoting the relevant bit:
"Q: How can I recover (undelete) deleted files from my ext3 partition?
Actually, you can't! This is what one of the developers, Andreas
Dilger, said about it:

In order to ensure that ext3 can safely resume an unlink after a
crash, it actually zeros out the block pointers in the inode, whereas
ext2 just marks these blocks as unused in the block bitmaps and marks
the inode as "deleted" and leaves the block pointers alone.

Your only hope is to "grep" for parts of your files that have been
deleted and hope for the best."

And no, I've never lost any $1m files.  If only I had some of those!!!

-- 
Tony (echo 'spend!,pocket awide' | sed 'y/acdeikospntw!, /l at omcgtjuba.phi/')