Recovering Deleted Files

This post is specific to ext3 and ext4 partitions.

Yesterday I accidentally invoked bunzip2 without the --keep flag. This made me lose the original, compressed file. It would be complicated to get it back, therefore I used to extundelete to recover it. This post gives an example of the usage of extundelete.

First of all, I needed to have the partition mount as read-only, but I was using it to run my operating system, so I had to reboot and start from a live image.

Once I had it running, getting extundelete was easy

sudo dnf install extundelete

After that, I simply invoked

sudo extundelete --recover-file <path-to-file> <device>

In my case,

sudo extundelete --recover-file mg/wiki/dump.bz2 /dev/sda7

Finally, I copied the recovered file (found on a RECOVERED_FILES directory) to its final destination with cp and was done with it.

Hopefully this will be helpful to you someday.