extundelete is a utility to undelete files from an ext3 or ext4 partition. extundelete is designed to undelete files from an unmounted partition to a separate (mounted) partition. extundelete will restore any files it finds to a subdirectory of the current directory named “RECOVERED_FILES”
The ext3 and ext4 file systems are the most common default file systems in Linux distributions like Mint, Mageia, or Ubuntu. extundelete uses information stored in the partition’s journal to attempt to recover a file that has been deleted from the partition. There is no guarantee that any particular file will be able to be undeleted, so always try to have a good backup system in place, or at least put one in place after recovering your files!
extundelete uses some concepts and code first shown to be successful by the ext3grep program. extundelete is able to recover the contents of an inode by searching the file system’s journal for an old copy of that inode. It then uses that information to determine the file’s location within the file system. Then, extundelete reads the corresponding data and copies it to a file in the recovery directory.
extundelete is able to match the inode number of a file to a file name by searching the deleted entries in a directory, which are often left behind after deleting the file. If the deleted entry does not exist in the directory in the file system, extundelete will look for a match in older copies which are still in the journal.
This is free and open source software.
Website: extundelete.sourceforge.net
Support:
Developer: necase
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
extundelete is written in C++. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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