Well, it seems that no matter how many times it accidentally happens and you tell yourself that you won't make that mistake again it seems that the mistake finds a way of repeating itself.
A while back I was going through some old copies of files from my home directory and getting rid of stuff that was taking up too much disk space. I find it easier to do things from the command-line so there I was. Two terminal windows open... comparing files... seeing what I had extra copies of... removing the old out-of-date copy... I had probably been doing this for a couple of hours and was just about done. I ran across a directory named Larry that I didn't need any more so I simply did a rm -rf Larry and pressed return. About 3 seconds later my stomach jumped up into my throat, sweat started pouring off my forehead, my chest got tight... this was all because I realized that I was in the wrong terminal window and it just so happened that the present work directory that I was in for that terminal window was /home and my user directory happened to be named Larry. I hit CTRL+C and assessed the damage.
Well, as it turned out I couldn't tell that anything important was missing but I knew that there were things that I wouldn't realize were gone until I needed them. So, I found a nice little utility called ext3grep that allowed me to track down the deleted files and restore them. It saved my life! It turned out there was a lot of files deleted and many of them were very important. At that moment I told myself that when using rm -rf I will be more careful.
As a secondary precaution I started doing hourly diff backups of my important directories in case something happened like this again. Well, that was so 2008! Since then I upgraded my OS and haven't gotten around to setting up the hourly diff backups. I am still careful with the rm -rf command but wouldn't you know it!
Today I was creating a new project in Eclipse. I don't like putting all of my projects in the root workspace folder so instead I organize them by type. In this case, my new project was an example EJB but instead of the project being created in workspace/mycoolprojects/ejb/myprojectname it was created in workspace/mycoolprojects/ejb. Not a big deal but now this project's contents was intermixed with all my other project folders. I started by refactoring and moving the project to the correct location but Eclipse complained that the project would overlap another project. So, instead of dealing with it I simply deleted the myprojectname project. When asked if I wanted to delete the contents on disk I simply said yes and ignored the warning saying it couldn't be undone. All seemed fine for about 15 seconds when that voice I hear on occasions called me an idiot and told me how, from Eclipse's perspective, the project was workspace/mycoolprojects/ejb and therefore it wouldn't be surprising if Eclipse just deleted the ejb directory and everything in it. A quick check revealed that, as usual, the voice was right.
Well, I will say that in this case there was only one project in the ejb folder that I was upset about and that was the one that I had been working on just 6 hours earlier. It had not been committed to SCM or backed-up (again, haven't yet setup hourly diff backups). So I then went on the search for how to restore the missing stuff. At the time I didn't remember the utility I used last time this happened so I did a lot of searching. ... probably spent two hours searching. All I could find is a lot of pessimistic answers saying that it was virtually impossible to restore accidentally deleted files on an ext3 or ext4 file system.
Well, I knew this just wasn't true because I knew I had done it before and it actually seemed relatively easy last time. Then finally I found it, ext3grep! It all came back to me! So, I installed the package from the repository and fired it up. Unfortunately it simply returned some strange error about the superblock type not matching some hex value. I then did a bit more searching (now that I knew what I was looking for) and found that ext3grep just won't work with an ext4 file system.
I went back to searching hoping that someone had ported or was working on port of ext3grep to work with ext4 file systems. I found some good hits and a couple of projects that looked promising. And then I stumbled on what appeared to be a solution. extundelete (http://extundelete.sourceforge.net/options.html)! It even had the option that I was looking for, --resotre-directory!
Well, unfortunately the --restore-directory option simply told me how many files that I had lost and basically that I wasn't going to get them back. I was devastated and was now approaching the "spent too much time" milestone. But I decided to give extundelete one more try but this time I used its --restore-file option. Sure enough, it worked! I got a file back! Luckily, I had a directory list of all the contents of my ejb directory which meant that all I had to do was pass the list in to extundelete and to make a long story end, I got all my files back!
Thank you extundelete author(s) and community!!
