A lot of times I put forth emergency tools on this blog in the context of, “I’ve never had to use this, and happily so.” That was the case with ddrescue.
Unfortunately, I can vouch personally for extundelete (and a couple of other undelete tools for other file systems). Yes, it’s true. In the past, a younger and more foolish K.Mandla deleted some files and then whimpered in horror.
It happens to everyone I guess. The only difference is knowing well enough how to get something back before all hell breaks loose.
extundelete isn’t fancy, doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles, and doesn’t know exactly how or what you want to recover.
But it has saved my bacon more than once, and for that I am quite thankful.
The final, awful irony of me showing — or even just mentioning — extundelete is that you need a journaling file system if you expect it to undelete things from your system.
And for years now, I’ve only used ext2 … which doesn’t use journaling.
So it is rather odd that I would vouch for a tool as a winner, when I can’t even show that it works as promised.
No harm done, I guess. Remember this moment, when the time comes for you to go running after extundelete. Remember K.Mandla saying, “Relax, it’ll work fine. …” đ
Inconsolation 