Q: How Do I Undelete Files?
A: In general, this is very hard to do on unices because
of their multitasking nature. Undelete functionality for the
ext2fs file system is being worked on, but don't hold
your breath.
There are a number of packages available which instead provide
new commands for deleting and copying which move deleted files
into a "wastebasket" directory. The files can be recovered
until cleaned out automatically by background processing.
The Midnight Commander file manager provides an undelete facility
that uses Ext2 file system library functions and an undelete
directory for each file system. Commercial distribution packages
of MC may or may not have this feature enabled, so be sure to
look in the source code distribution for instructions on how
to enable the undelete feature.
Alternatively, you can search the raw disk device which holds
the file system in question. This is hard work, and you will
need to be logged in as root to do this. But it can be done.
Run grep on the raw device; e.g.:
grep -b 'bookmarks' /dev/hda
|
If the data has not been overwritten, you should be able to
recover it with a text editor.
[Dave Cinege, Daniel Novotny]
Q: How Do I Make
Backups?
A: You can back up a directory hierarchy or complete
file system to any media using GNU tar or cpio,
the standard *nix tools for this purpose. tar seems to
be the more commonly used program currently, and includes command
line options to make compressed, incremental, and multi-volume
backups. Complete information is contained in the documentation,
which is in GNU Texinfo format.
A: The free program, Amanda,
receives a lot of mentions on Usenet. Its home page is http://www.amanda.org.
A: Several commercial backup utilities also exist.
They are often included in commercial distributions.
Q: Is There
a Defragmenter for Ext2fs?
A: Yes. There is defrag,
a Linux file system defragmenter for ext2, Minix,
and old-style ext file systems. It is available at ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/filesystems/defrag-0.70.tar.gz.
Users of the ext2 file system can probably do without
defrag, because ext2
contains extra code to keep fragmentation reduced even in very
full file systems.
