Tim here. There are two separate matters at play: 1) recovering deleted files 2) mitigating it from happening again in the future When it comes to undeleting the files that were deleted, there are a lot of variables at play--the file system (ext2, ext3, ext4, XFS, JFS, ZFS, etc), whether the disk was encrypted, the underlying disk arrangement if it's LVM, and the types of files that were deleted. However, the most important thing is to not write anything else to the drive until you've taken a disk image that you can operate on. If you can, reboot into a live boot environment (such as a live CD or live USB), and use dd(1) to make an image of your drive to another larger drive. Once you have that, you can operate on the drive, secure in the knowledge that it shouldn't get any *worse*. Some file-types have internal characteristics such as JPG image files and there are programs like "recoverjpeg" that can scavenge the raw sectors of a disk image and find things that have the shape of a JPG image and recover those. Unfortunately, MP3 files don't seem to have a consistent "magic number" (some identifying bytes at the beginning of the file) which makes it a bit more of a challenge to extract the raw bits. There are some undelete utilities, but I've had mixed success. So I'm afraid I don't have much good news about recovering the deleted information. For the mitigation aspect, I like how ZFS does it. Snapshots are nearly instantaneous, and only occupy as much space as the delta from from its neighbors. So they're storage-efficient too. There are some wrappers that take a snapshot every N minutes/hours/days, and they then manage those snapshots, winnowing out older ones after a time. Every snapshot is available under a hidden .zfs directory in the root zpool, making it easy to recover files. It's still no alternative to a backup, but it has saved me on several occasions. Unfortunately, ZFS on Linux is not as trivial to do as it is on FreeBSD (which is what I use as my daily driver). That said, there are other processes that you can run that will take regular backups of your system, either to the same drive or to an external backup device. So it sounds like this might be one of your best options. I just wish I had more encouraging word for you. -Tim On 2022-08-17 18:15, Linux for blind general discussion wrote: > We interrupt this discussion to bring you a new topic. > Hi All: Back on August 01, I ripped several streams of President Biden's > speech on Afghanistan. I have a script to convert from mp3 to an aac. > However, in my haste, instead of just deleting the mp3s in that directory, I > nuked all audio files I recorded that day. I know, I need a backup strategy, > something where any file which I nuke would endup in a temporary trash for > like 6 hours. Usually when I make similar errors, I know rather fast. > So, many years ago, when I was in DOS, I could type "undelete" and it would > provide a list of files, which you fill in the first letter. I gather > recovering files in a Debian SID system is complicated? 1 of my Linux > experts suggested I install testdisk. Trouble is it really doesn't read well > in speakup. Another of my experts ran it here, says I have an LVM. Seemingly > running a df -h shows home as /dev/sda3. At this point I only need files I > nuked from August 01. Can some1 please inform of either packages or > sequences I can run to try-and-restore these? I suppose if I can use a > wild-card in that directory or provide it on a commandline? Thanks so much > in advance > Chime > > _______________________________________________ > Blinux-list mailing list > Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx > https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list > _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list