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Re: recover file after cat /dev/null > file

To: Steve Lord <lord@xxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: recover file after cat /dev/null > file
From: Jim Cistaro <jim.cistaro@xxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2001 13:13:28 -0700
Cc: linux-xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx
References: <3BB4D484.3020806@xxxxxx> <200109282004.f8SK4Q128211@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sender: owner-linux-xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.4) Gecko/20010915
The file is large ~8GB.
By catting the partition I could determine the offset of the start of the data for the first inode.

Would this help.
Can you point me to any documention that might discuss this?

Thanks,
JIm
---

Steve Lord wrote:

if /dev/null has been catted over an existing file,
is there any way to recover data based on inodes (or anything else)?

Nothing else has been written to disk since so data should still exist.


Yes, but the tricky part is where. You overwrote the inode and
freed it's extents, the data is somewhere in the freespace on
the filesystem, but locating it is not going to be easy.

Unless the file was very large, or the filesystem fairly full,
the chances are the data is located in the same allocation
group as the inode, but really I cannot tell you more than
that.

Sorry

  Steve



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Jim Cistaro - jim.cistaro@xxxxxx <mailto:jim.cistaro@xxxxxx>
Senior Engineer - AltaVista Company <http://www.altavista.com>
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