Linux Community Magazine

Is your system virus infected and the virus has deleted your valuable files? Have you accidentally deleted your critical business files from Linux hard drive? If your answer is 'Yes' for any of the above questions, you have encountered a critical data loss situation that may severely affect your business as well as personal operations. In such cases, you need to perform Linux Data Recovery to get your mission-critical data back. Recovering deleted files from other operating systems is quite easy as compared to Linux, as a number of free or paid recovery software are available for them. But how to recover lost data from Linux system?

To recover deleted files from the Linux hard drive, Linux operating system provides two in-built utilities. These tools are actually based on the file system of Linux, which you are using on your hard drive. The Linux Recovery tools are:

Extundelete- It is a tool, which recovers deleted files from Ext4 or Ext3 file system volume of Linux operating system. Both these file systems are popular and widely used in Linux. These tool uses information stored in journal of Ex3 or Ext4 volumes to recover the file, which has been deleted from the volume. The utility recovers both the file names and contents of the file.

Ext3undel- It is a set of scripts for helping you to retrieve deleted files from Ext3 or Ext2 file system volumes. This utility attempts to automate various difficult manual recovery jobs to help retrieve lost files from specified disk. You can recover a particular file by its file name or can recover all the files that are marked as deleted.

E2undel- It is an interaction console utility, which recovers lost or deleted files from the Ext2 file system volume. It enables you to perform Data Recovery Linux for selected files by file name. It is quite simple to use.

Although, the above tools are helpful in recovering deleted files from Linux hard drive, they can neither handle severe disk corruption nor can guarantee recovery in all cases of data loss. In such cases, Linux Data Recovery software come to your rescue, and work in all cases of logical data loss. They are totally safe and easy to use.