lost and found

[Peter Risdon]

Matthew Seaman wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 26, 2004 at 10:12:18AM +0100, Peter Risdon wrote:
> 
>>I'd be very grateful if someone would steer me towards some 
>>documentation about dealing with, even recovering, files in lost and 
>>found directories.
> 
> 
> There's not a great deal out there, because the lost+found directory
> is pretty uncomplicated.  See fsck(8) for the basics, but what happens
> is this.  An unclean shutdown can result in corrupted information
> being written into a directory structure.  That effectively wipes out
> all record of a files' *name*.  However, the exhaustive search of the
> filesystem contents done by fsck(8) can still locate the files
> *contents*.  Rather than just throwing that data away the files are
> preserved by making a directory entry in the 'lost+found' directory.
> Unfortunately, since the file name is lost, the system has to make up
> it's own name, which it does based on the inode number of the file.
> That's a good choice, because it's guarranteed to be unique amongst
> all of the files on that filesystem.
> 
> Unfortunately there isn't going to be some sort of nice automated
> system you can use to restore everything to the way it was before the
> crash: if there was, fsck(8) would do that already for you.  You're
> going to have to go through all of those orphaned files and by
> inspecting the contents try and work out what they were and where they
> belong.

Great - just what I needed to know. Thanks very much.

Peter.

> 
> 	Cheers,
> 
> 	Matthew
>