[ale] Get paid for undelete on ext3 help

[James P. Kinney III]

https://listman.redhat.com/pipermail/ext3-users/2002-June/003633.html

>From the man who WROTE ext3, it is pretty much a hopeless cause unless

certain precautions in advance.

"If you use e2image to save snapshots of the filesystem metadata, you
can use that to recover from deleted files that existed before the
e2image metadata snapshot was taken.  The real answer though is to
keep regular backups of your data....

						- Ted"

As much as I like journaling file systems, this has brought up an
interesting point. If ext3 has, essentially, no provision for recovery
from an accidental deletion, should it be in use as the default file
system on a major, commercial distribution?  Granted, most new people
would use the cute little trash can on the X screen and this problemm
would not have come up here. 

But a fumble finger on the command line and user data can be
irretrievable. I see a desperate need for a FAST rethink on e2fsprogs
design. As a short cut, I am now looking at replacing rm with a script
that call e2image to dump to a metadata logfile prior to any use of rm.

A cursory glance at the other journaling filesystems (XFS mainly as I
use that also) show no standing process for undeletion. From SGI's site

"Q: Does the filesystem have a undelete function?

There is no undelete in XFS, in fact once you delete something, the
chances are the space it used to occupy is the first thing reused.
Undelete is really something you have to design in from the start.
Getting anything back after a accidental rm -rf is near to impossible. "

>From Hans Reiser:

"If you pay us a fee for his time, we can have Vitaly try to hand
recover
the files, assuming you
haven`t used the disk for writes.  No guarantees, but it might be
doable.
 There is no undelete
feature, though maybe there ought to be.  Somday we will have an fs
editor
that will make it
feasible for average users to attempt such a thing, but today.....

Hans"

So, at this point, I don't recommend ANY journaling file systems for
anyone without a good, up and running backup system. In unix, rm is a
command, not a request!


-- 
James P. Kinney III   \Changing the mobile computing world/
President and CEO      \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244             \.___________________________./

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
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