giis: The benefit of the doubt

I owe a couple leftover posts to severe network issues last weekend, so here are a couple of extras for today:

It’s unusual for me to find software that’s not in Arch/AUR and not in Debian, but is packaged in another distro.

Or maybe I just don’t go looking enough. Regardless, I believe giis is in Fedora, but some assembly might be required, if you’re using something else.

giis is an undelete tool specific to ext2 and ext3, but with a spinoff version for ext4. As best I can tell, giis doesn’t handle anything outside of those three filesystems. That’s not uncommon for what I can tell though; I have yet to run into a universal undeleter for Linux. 🙄

At this point, I have to make a disclaimer: I couldn’t get giis to run fully under Arch. Nine times out of ten, that’s because I’ve done something wrong, so don’t blame giis for that.

I got as far as the startup menu, but most options insisted I install giis (which I thought I had) or spat out errors (which suggests I misconfigured it).

And knowing that it’s packaged in Fedora, and has won a few application awards, I have a strong feeling I set it up wrong.

So I will give giis the benefit of the doubt, and say it’s my error that’s keeping it from running on my system. If you’re a Fedora user, please give it a turn and tell me how it worked.

extundelete: When the time comes, remember it

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. …” 😉