HOWTO : Undelete files and directories on Ubuntu

extundelete is a utility that can recover deleted files from an ext3 or ext4 partition.

Hereby, I am going to show to how to compile and install this utility from source on Ubuntu 10.10. The current version of extundelete is 0.2.0 at this time of writing.

Step 1 :

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install build-essential libtool e2fslibs-dev autoconf automake autotools-dev m4 e2fslibs e2fsprogs

wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/extundelete/files/extundelete/0.2.0/extundelete-0.2.0.tar.bz2/download

tar -xvjf extundelete-0.2.0.tar.bz2
cd extundelete-0.2.0
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install

Step 1a : (Alternative)

If you want to generate a debian installable file instead of install from source, you can use this step.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install build-essential libtool e2fslibs-dev autoconf automake autotools-dev m4 e2fslibs e2fsprogs checkinstall

wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/extundelete/files/extundelete/0.2.0/extundelete-0.2.0.tar.bz2/download

tar -xvjf extundelete-0.2.0.tar.bz2
cd extundelete-0.2.0
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo checkinstall

Follow the instruction on screen to complete the debian executable file generation.

sudo dpkg -i extundelete_0.2.0-1_amd64.deb
or
sudo dpkg -i extundelete_0.2.0-1_i386.deb

Step 2 :

Usage :

Help -
extundelete --help

To undelete test.png file at /dev/sda3 and /home/samiux -
extundelete /dev/sda3 --restore-file /home/samiux/test.png

To undelete test directory at /dev/sda3 and /home/samiux -
extundelete /dev/sda3 --restore-directory /home/samiux/test

To undelete all files and directories at /dev/sda3 -
extundelete /dev/sda3 --restore-all

That's all! See you.