about two years ago, my girlfriend sent me an sms. she asked me to ssh over to her notebook at home. she was skiing and her mother needed to do some stuff on the nb but kde wasn’t starting up because of a full hd. it took me some seconds to spot a folder called “backup” and some more seconds to delete its content – just backups, who needs them? so.. at least my girlfriend. she stored the main part of her music in that folder. “backup” meaning: this is backupmusic. hm.. think so..
to make my point: it was on an ext3 filesystem. i googled around, trying to find a way to recover the files. but i only found a message in den ext3 faq. the answer made a clear statement: no recovering of deleted files on ext3.
yesterday it happened again. but this time it was itunes. evil itunes.. i’m running itunes in a vmware to sync my iphone. it took me 4 days to clean up my mp3 collection. nice tags, nice filenames, cleaned out some useless stuff. it was nice and neat. while trying to reimport the newly tagged files in itunes i hit the wrong button: all the files on the smb share were deleted. guess what: on an ext3 filesystem.
i was a bit shocked. all my nicely tagged mp3s where gone. not really hoping to find something, i started to google like two years ago. and i got a hit.
ext3grep rocks!!! i love this application. it’s an open source app to recover deleted files from ext3 (not from crashed filesystems!). i could not recover everything, but i got about two thirds of my mp3s back. the last third should be on my iphone, so i’m currently downloading the files from it using winamp.
all i need to do was running it with –recover-all on my notebook. it recovered also some older files but that wasn’t a problem. i just wanted to have my music back.
read the linked tutorial carefully! you’ll find two very important links on the bottom: donate something to the author. he did a very good job and provides it for free. below the donation link you’ll find the downloads.
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