[Thinkpad] linux file-recovery

> favour - although that would largely depend on whether Ext3 file-systems tend to
> scatter successive writes around the available empty space, or always go for the
> lowest-numbered cluster available in the unused space. This is something I
> haven't yet found out, but I think my fortunes will depend largely on how this
> works. If successive disk-writes are scattered around, I might have dozens of
> cpoies of my files, because I saved them many times before the mistake happened.

yes, ext3 (and unix filesystems in general) tend not to require any
defragmenting. you ought to have one-and-really-only-one copy of each
chunk of data....

the safest thing to do, if you've made a mistake, is make an image of the
entire disk with 'dd'. once you have that stored someplace safe, you can
experiment with recovery strategies via grep, search-and-replace, et
cetera.

recovering plain text or source code files from filesystem dumps tends to
be pretty easy.

> disposing of ThinkPads, and somehow feel ThinkPads just won't be
> ThinkPads any more in anything but name once I.B.M. don't have them any
> more.

most hardware is made under contract, regardless of which company we're
talking about :)

--elijah
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Received on Sat Dec 11 14:04:03 2004