Retaining undelete data on ext3

[Keld Jørn Simonsen]

On Sun, Sep 24, 2006 at 10:55:10AM -0700, Stephen Samuel wrote:
> Having just spent a day trying to recover a deleted ext3 file
> for a friend, I'm wondering about this way of maintining
> undelete information in ext3, like is done for ext2:
> 
> The last step in the deletion process would be to put back
> the (previously zeroed) block pointers.  Since it gets logged
> to the journal, I _think_ that this should be safe.  The worst
> that would happen is that, if the plug gets pulled in the
> middle of a file delete, the old block pointers would be
> unavailable --  I don't see this as a killer issue, since
> editing the filesystem to do an undelete should be considered an
> emergency operation anyways.

I have a design to improve ext3 so that one could salvage all files,
even if you accidently reformated the partition, Available at 
http://std.dkuug.dk/keld/lazy3.txt
This design has been reviewed by Ted.

I also have some patches for debugfs to undelete files in ext3,
available at http://std.dkuug.dk/keld/readme-salvage.html

best regards
keld