On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 08:27:13PM +0000, pa3gcu wrote:
> Even DOS or widows cannot always recover deleted files, one has to do quite
> complicated things, your approach saying in "General" there is no way is
> simply NOT true period. I still dont quite understand your origanal statement,
> i quote;
I can't speak for Windows, because there are major differencies between Windows
variants, but MS-DOS is a single-process, single-user OS and its filesystem
is based in allocation tables; not i-nodes. FAT's stucture is not so dynamic
as the tree-based structure of ext2; not to speak about ext3.
In MS-DOS undeleting files is trivial, i.e. the process of undeleting
(programmatically) is really trivial, and the chances to retrieve the
missing file are a lot. Of course you pay for this kind of simplicity,
because DOS has other major disadvantages, such as fragmentation (i.e.
when a file is deleted a hole in the fs is created, which most probably
will dissapear after a defragmentation process; as long as you don't
defrag you have *great chances* of undeleting your file).
OTOH no Unix fs has designed for undeleting files. *Noone*. Read the specs
for UFS, ext2, minixfs, etc. There is no undeleting feature by design,
because they are created for multi-process, multi-user enviroments, which makes
undeleting difficult and, last but not least, an undeleting feature would
need major redesign of the filesystem, resulting to a new fs with quite a lot
of problems such as less speed in data manipulation, fragmentation, etc.
I stand in my original position. I think it's good for newbies to know that
there is no trivial or general way to *always* come back from rm. Removing
files means removing files for ever, and users/admins should use rm with
caution. Solutions are hacks, such as debugfs: a tool for testing
the ext2 implementation, which don't always work.
ANW, I believe that the thread must die here. :-)
Elias
--
University of Athens I bet the human brain
Physics Department is a kludge --Marvin Minsky
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