extundelete For Linux

extundelete is a utility that can recover deleted files from an ext3 or ext4 partition. The ext3 filesystem is the most common file system when using Linux, and ext4 is its successor. extundelete uses the information stored in the partition's journal to attempt to recover a file that has been deleted from the partition. There is no guarantee that any particular file will be able to be undeleted, so always try to have a good backup system in place, or at least put one in place after recovering your files!

If you have deleted files from an ext4 file system, the choice is easy: extundelete is the first and only program able to restore both the contents and the file name of a deleted file. If the partition you have deleted files from is an ext3 file system, extundelete still has several advantages over ext3grep. extundelete is able to restore a file immediately after parsing the journal file. ext3grep parses the entire hard drive before it begins to restore files from the hard disk.

The ext3grep method is efficient for restoring many files from a small partition. extundelete is designed to be faster if you need to restore files from a large partition. Also, because extundelete uses the ext2fs library, many features of the ext3 or ext4 filesystems will be automatically supported by extundelete if it is compiled and run with a version of the ext2fs library that supports those features.