[Sheflug] ext2 Data Recovery - A lost cause?

[James Wallbank <nospam [at] xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Everyone,

Happy New Year!

A friend of mine (it's not me, honest!) has been careless with wildcard
characters, and deleted about 220 files from his SuSE fileserver that
are really quite important. Skillfully, he managed to do this just
before the weekly backup. Oooops!

I've made a complete image of the partition (which is a 60GB ext2
partition) but I'm struggling to recover the data. I don't know the
exact filenames, but I do know when the data was deleted. Unfortunately,
the deleted files are of all sorts of varied characteristics, from a few
K to several megabytes in size, with a whole plethora of naming tactics
- because they were authored by several people.

I've tried Mandrake's "recover -a", and then "e2fsck -y", but the whole
thing froze up, and another e2fsck showed that I'd invalidated the
superblock on the disk image - so I made another one.

Is the whole thing a lost cause with so many files missing?

Are there any other tools available that can help me?

Have you any other thoughts on this sort of mass data recovery effort?

(The advice "Just give up" IS helpful - because I won't waste my time if
it's going to take days!)

Thanks for your help. (And yes, I'll be sure to pass on your amused
jeers and cruel laughter!)

James

-- 
James Wallbank
Redundant Technology Initiative
Access Space - 1 Sidney Street - Sheffield - S1 4RG - UK
T: +44 (0)114 2495522
F: +44 (0)114 2495533
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