Topic: Please Help Me!! I accidently erased an ibay.

[amicheals]

Hello,

I accidently erased an ibay that I desperately need.  I erased it from the server manager interface.  Please help me get it back.  I was using that as a file server.

Amy

[dsemuk]

Just found this thread:

http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=26396.0

Doesn't look good for data recovery, although a search of Google reveals several tools which claim to be able to recover deleted data from Linux disks, however looks like you will have to pay for the pleasure...

SpinRite from GRC doesn't look like it is a tool for undeleting Linux.

Goodluck

Dave

[tandum]

Sorry,

You've lost it. The EXT3 file system used by SME clears the drive space when you delete something. These recovery tools that boast EXT3 recovery can only recover files from EXT2 file systems not EXT3. I've been in the same boat and even professional data recovery centers can't get the data back.

A trash can for samba would be nice in these situations.

I don't suppose you have a backup, else you wouldn't be asking here

[XAPBob]

even professional data recovery centers can't get the data back.

I wouldn't be so sure - there is alot a proper data recovery centre can do.

If it's really valuable (>£1000) then try someone like vogon - they managed to recover data of a completely hosed disk I had once (even after someone had tried a recovery and therefore made it more difficult...)

Disks have memory - the 'obvious' data is what the drive heads read, but more sensitive equipment can often pick up previously recorded data...

Talk to them at least...

[Janm]

try this

http://active-undelete.com/
or this

http://www.runtime.org

take out the drive and put it on a windows comp
as a slave and format it with ntfs and then try to recover it
i did that and recoverd nerly 80 gb
It took ca 8 hrs
Jan

[chris burnat]

take out the drive and put it on a windows comp
as a slave and format it with ntfs and then try to recover it

Interesting! May pay to dd the original drive to another one first, and  mount the copy in Windows.

[tandum]

even professional data recovery centers can't get the data back.

I wouldn't be so sure - there is alot a proper data recovery centre can do.

If it's really valuable (>£1000) then try someone like vogon - they managed to recover data of a completely hosed disk I had once (even after someone had tried a recovery and therefore made it more difficult...)

Disks have memory - the 'obvious' data is what the drive heads read, but more sensitive equipment can often pick up previously recorded data...

Talk to them at least...

All of them say they can .. but none can deliver.

Even if you could get MI5 to recover the data, without file pointers to where each file segment starts and stops even they are lost.

This quote is from an EXT3 developer.

In order to ensure that ext3 can safely resume an unlink after a crash, it actually zeros out the block pointers in the inode, whereas
ext2 just marks these blocks as unused in the block bitmaps and marks the inode as "deleted" and leaves the block pointers alone.

The NTFS format option is novel and obviously bullshit, but i'll try it out this week just to be sure. It may work on EXT2 but not on EXT3 as far as I can see.

[Janm]

Forgot to tel
It was 2 hd with 80 gb on each
and i have used them as serving files on in a windows server
with ntfs file system.
And had taken them out of the comp and stored them for a while
And one day i needed a couple of disks to sme 7.xx for raid1
and then i took these and used them
Afte that i remembered what was on them and then all my restorring bagan

Jan

[JohnG]

Janm, maybe I'm missing something but you're talking about successful data retrieval from a former NTFS partition after an SME install, right? That isn't the situation with the original poster which is the deletion of an SME ibay. As far as I know, SME uses EXT3 and it's extremely non-trivial to reconstruct data from deleted EXT3 files.

Amy, can you give us more background info: What kind of files were in the ibay? How many files were in the ibay? How many need to be retrieved? What happened with the server immediately after the ibay was deleted? What is the status of the server today? If the files were text based, files fragments could possibly be retrieved but it's not easy. I don't want to give you false hope, it's next to impossible to retrieve anything useful after an ibay is deleted as far as I know.

[Janm]

Hej:
Yes i forgot that
But thought it was worth a try if anything else failed
Have some faith
Jan dk  

[NickCritten]

All of them say they can .. but none can deliver.

I Beg to differ.
I accidentally deleted /home/e-smith/files/users on one machine and managed to recover all the emails.
The files has no names, were not in folders, and there was a lot of rubbish, but I managed it in the end.
It was a hell of a lot of work, but it CAN be done.

Of course I was recovering plain text files for the most part, so I knew what I was looking for.
Binaries are another matter completely; you can't recover the files, then do a file contents search like I did for the emails.


amicheals:
I'm afraid you should consider this a very hard lesson.
BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP

Check out the backup2 contrib, which will allow you to effectively backup to a network workstation, or to a USB hard disk. It's a godsend.