cgsecurity.org

Hi,
yesterday I accidentally deleted lot of vacation photos, on ext4 with 64bit flag set....
in the past I used Testdisk that recovered files on some exfat (if I remember), but since it's ext4 testdisk don't provide undelete menu...

I tried extundelet, ext4magic but both are outdated, no more maintained, and even warned against use by developer for ext4magic..... Didn't work, ended using photorec that restored a few of them and a lot of old (and even not deleted) photo, so, now I have a bunch of duplicated files... and lot of loss

We don't have any solution for ext4, and today this is the most used filesystem on linux

I'm ready to financially participate to ext4 support in testdisk, really, loosing memories is more valuable than anything, I'm sure that lot of people would do also.
is there an impossibility to recover file on ext4 like on ext2?

thanks and regards

Interesting! How much will your participation be?

how much will it take to implement?

I'm low income right now, so at most I can put 100€ now... maybe others can join?

https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk_doc ... torec.html give some tips on how to deal with duplicated files
PhotoRec can skip the allocated blocks, so if it recover a file that is not deleted, it's because it has recovered a deleted copy...

ext3 and ext4 purge the metadata when a file is deleted, it's why it's not possible to develop a reliable undelete for ext4 like it was done for ext2.
Analyzing the ext4 journal is already what extundelete/ext4magic are doing. I have no good idea to improve the situation.

Note that most Linux distributions run fstrim on SSD once a week, so data recovery is more and more unreliable.