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EvilDragon

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Okay... here is my problem:
I have about 40Gigs of MP3s, rsynced every nite on another HD.
The filesystems are both EXT3 on my linux server.

Yesterday iTunes accidentally deleted all my MP3s (via network) on the main disk.
I realized that today - after rsync deleted all the MP3s on the backup drive as well...
I quickly unmounted the backup disk.

Now I need to recover the lost MP3s:

1. idea: Undelete for EXT3... seems impossible to do, as I read on the forums.
2. idea: Since ALL of the deleted files are MP3s with a CORRECT ID3 header (both V1 and V2), I thought of a ripper which searches either through a big file or directly on the Ext3 harddisk for MP3s and saves them on another drive...

I'm not very picky in restoring the data - it's enough for me to get the MP3 files back in any way. I don't care about the filename, as I can restore them using the tags! I just need to restore those files anyhow...

Any ideas?
 
you can recover files on a ext3 system afaik, thats the only good thing ext2/3 has ;) the Midnight Commander "mc" has a recover function, not sure if its only for ext2 or also for 3, but you can make a ext3 partition from a ext2 so it should be possible the other way too..
 
That's the problem:
The difference between the ext2 and ext3 fs (except the journaling) is that when you delete a file on an ext2 partition, the corresponding inode gets unlinked and when you delete a file on an ext3 partition, the inode is immediately overwritten by zeros...

So no luck there... :(
 
Yup, as I can create a raw image of the EXT3fs, I can look through that.

I found Ontrack EasyRecovery, which can do exactly what I need... look for MP3s on a raw drive.
I rescued about 90% of the MP3s, which is actually pretty good :)
 
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