On Saturday 28 October 2006 12:09, Matthew Stringer wrote:
Cheers, to be honest if I can't restore the directory structure the files will be useless as they won't mean anything unless I know where they belong.
AFAIK, if the guy did an rm -fr on your root dir then your filesystem is outright hosed. The only reasonable chance of a recovery would be to send it to data recovery specialists. This will cost an arm and two legs, however, and still might not work. You chances from recovering from an 'fdisk' screw up are higher - i've actually fully recovered partitions after accidentally deleting them. The reason that undelete under Windows is so easy is because of the way a delete works: the block which holds the data is simply marked as freed, but the data isn't nuked. On old DOS systems, a delete simply removed the FIRST LETTER of the filename, and this effectively removed the file from view. An undelete required that you specify a first letter for the file (it needn't be the original first letter, but the file needed *some* first letter). On journaled filesystems, like rieser and ext3, and undelete becomes technically much more difficult to do, for reasons beyond my full comprehension.
The machine was a webserver, had 900 websites on it.
If there were no backups, then the organization he worked for is just as guilty as he is for the lost data. To second Anders' note about suing the guy: i would honestly contact the police and see if you can pursue that as a cyber crime. i wouldn't be surprised if the intentional destruction of a company's electronic assets can be presecuted as a felony crime (perhaps even "terrorism", considering the "flexible" definition of that word). AFAIK, cyber-crime automatically falls into the realm of the FBI, and not local authorities (an employee stole some proprietary info from my mom's company computers when he left, and she was directed to the FBI... who in turn refused to even look at the evidence (videos) which she brought them). The guy needs to have his balls removed unless, of course, the 900 sites he deleted were kiddy porn or some such, in which case he did the right thing ;). -- ----- stephan@s11n.net http://s11n.net "...pleasure is a grace and is not obedient to the commands of the will." -- Alan W. Watts