File Recovery -- Any Open Source Live CDs?

[John Collier]

Huc,

Looks promising. I will check it out when I get back to the house and let everybody know what I learn.

Thanks!

[Steven E. Protter]

Sorry John about the non-response.

I was busy and missed the thread when it popped back to the top.

What we try to do at work is keep significant data on EMC nfs based storage. This has a nice snapshot feature that stores backups on disk.

For the systems themselves, we install acronis and it writes to CD or NFS.

Acronis does not meet the live CD criteria however.

The three live CD distributions I have you do meet this critera and can all write entire systems to tape, CD/DVD and NFS.

As a matter of fact, I use Ubuntu to recover data from trashed Windows systems.

None of the solutions totally meets the criteria of the question, therefore when I saw your clarification and re-read the question, I was satisfied with the reward.

You sounded somewhat irritated with me so I explain my response, non-response and beg for forgiveness for not following up sooner.

Do with this response what you may. I learned from and bookmarked the thread and am happy with the outcome.

Regards,

SEP

[John Collier]

Steven,

Not irritated with you personally, just frustrated with the situation in general.

I know you are one of the busiest people in these forums. All one has to do is to look at the amount of points you put on the board on a monthly, weekly, or even daily average to understand how one small thread such as this could miss your overburdened attention.

What frustrated me was that I was forced to give you, of all people such a low point award over such a trivial thing.

I could tell that you had most likely misread or misinterpreted the question and I truly wanted to believe that you would pull yet another rabbit out of you hat given the time.

I appreciate your efforts in these forums in general (as I am sure so many others do as well) and it is always an honor to have you chime in on my threads.

On the recovery note, I can verify Knoppix and Fedora Live to be wonderful tools for recovering general data from many a trashed M$ system. Knoppix is usually my tool of choice simply because it automatically makes all of the HDD partitions available at least in a read-only manner.

What I am specifically looking for this time is a bit different in the fact that the HDD is not trashed, but the user deleted the files, in error, and now need to be recovered if possible. This is a game I have not played prior to now and I admit to being a bit lost.

I think the tools that Huc pointed me to have great potential. I wanted to try them last night, but life got in the way. I will have to take another shot at it tonight.

Thanks again!

PS. Please rest assured that if I ever get irritated at you or anybody else here it is very, very likely that there will be little to no doubt about it. One of my weaknesses is keeping my feelings hidden on matters such as that. If you need verification on that, just ask Pete. I am sure that he will back me up on that one!


Make it a WONDERFUL day!

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

This is really raw but here it is:

http://recover.sourceforge.net/linux/

http://home.fnal.gov/~muzaffar/undelete/README.html

I searched hard and found nothing that looked professional. I know such stuff exists for Windows.

The last link looks serviceable, though you need to catch the delete quickly to prevent the file's disk portions from being overwritten by other files.

What you have pointed out is a glaring hole in the Linux and possibly Linux world.

Though as I mentioned before NFS with snapshots on an EMC does accomplish the goal very expensively.

SEP

[John Collier]

Huc,

Sorry for the long wait on feedback for you.

You were SO close to having what I needed to recover my friend's PC/Windoze lost files with that last one! The biggest drawback to what you pointed out was that it required installation on the effected machine and was NOT a live CD.

The hunt continues....