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sebastian

Member

Registered: 2013-10-12

Posts: 36

Can i restore a deleted file on an EXT4 partition without unmounting i

The video was stored on the system partition.

I need to figure this out in the case something more important is deleted in the future.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 23,923

Re: Can i restore a deleted file on an EXT4 partition without unmounting i

there's extundelete but generally speaking various mechanisms can make this difficult/impossible, afaik still not "without unmounting", so keep a live disk handy and more importantly, make backups. Even stuff that makes this much more possible like btrfs will not save you from physical damage

And some general precautions like using rm with the -i option, or setting up an alias so stuff get's thrashed instead of deleted first.

Last edited by V1del (2025-01-17 12:09:14)

sebastian

Member

Registered: 2013-10-12

Posts: 36

Re: Can i restore a deleted file on an EXT4 partition without unmounting i

I assumed it would be easier to do this. Not sure if i should even try to do a recovery in this case. Maybe i should still try it to see how it works but i don't really want to reboot any time soon.

mpan

Member

Registered: 2012-08-01

Posts: 1,367

Website

Re: Can i restore a deleted file on an EXT4 partition without unmounting i

The longer the file system is mounted as writeable, the more likely it is the data is completely lost.

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Sometimes I seem a bit harsh — don’t get offended too easily!

sebastian

Member

Registered: 2013-10-12

Posts: 36

Re: Can i restore a deleted file on an EXT4 partition without unmounting i

extundelete worked and was simpler than expected (i used --restore-all due to --restore-directory failing).

Some deleted files couldn't be restore but the one i was interested in could somehow still be recovered (didn't see any issues with it).