Since this has come up, I was wondering if anyone has any ideas about recovering deleted files (short of going to the backups as not everyone does them). This probably doesn't strictly belong in this mailing list, but I'll bring it up here since it can directly affect regular users. I'll take it off-list with any who are interested, if there are any objections to it's being here. In searching for an answer to Issa Rabba's dilemma about having deleted /etc, I found the following message from a couple of years ago... https://www.redhat.com/archives/ext3-users/2002-June/msg00031.html and began wondering about the following hypothetical situation using ext3fs. If I were to use e2image on a daily basis to record the filesystem metadata (and storing that on a different partition or machine for example), how would I go about using this to get the data back? I'm guessing debugfs will help with this, but I must be more tired than I thought because it's not jumping out at me. The data from e2image is apparently quite compressible, sounds like about 3-4M per 10G from the man page, so it should be rather easy to implement something which might cover, say, a week's worth without taking up too much disk space (depends on just how much disk space you have of course). I would think that this would be (could be?) faster at getting the data back than breaking out the backups. It certainly wouldn't be a replacement for proper backups (and doesn't get around the user being prepared for such things), but it may help with the odd 'one off' deleted file retrievals. Any thoughts? Has somebody perhaps scripted or programmed something which does this already? If some part of the above isn't making sense, just put it off to my being tired :) Ron
