How to recover deleted files on ext3 fs
- by Mike
I have a drive which was using the ext3 filesystem. I am told that about 10Gb of data was deleted off the drive (probably via rm). The drive is currently mounted as read-only to preserve all data. Does anyone know of a method to restore some or all of the data? Also if it helps, the OS was Fedora.
I've also been told that the data is mostly ASCII fortan source code and Matlab files.
Conclusion
I have finally managed to get the data back, and with the simplest means ever! After weeks of trying and failing to bring back much of any data, I brought someone in today to take a look at it and offer suggestions, he simply cd'd to the directory and everything was there! It was never lost in the first place!!! Needless to say I feel really dumb right now, but I learned quite a lot with this whole fiasco.
At any rate, while I was looking through data forensics solutions, I found that the Autopsy, or more specifically the SleuthKit was the most helpful. So I will accept that as the final answer.
I would also like to note for anyone that comes across this later on that the most up-voted (currently) answer by sekenre was also helpful and I learned a lot, but ultimately it did not help with the type (very many, and some being very large) of files I was dealing with.
So thank to all you that provided suggestions and wish you all the best!
