joelrfernandes Posted March 9, 2015 Share Posted March 9, 2015 Hey guys, Is there a way to recover an overwritten file? I accidently did tar cfz file.tgz instead of xfz Link to comment
SSD Posted March 9, 2015 Share Posted March 9, 2015 Hey guys, Is there a way to recover an overwritten file? I accidently did tar cfz file.tgz instead of xfz This is a surprisingly uncommon question. The only way I know is to run the file system recovery program (reiserfsck for RFS) and get it to undelete all files. If the file was not overwritten yet you might have luck, but likely a lot of garbage to look through. Link to comment
joelrfernandes Posted March 9, 2015 Author Share Posted March 9, 2015 That's the thing, the file was overwritten with an empty file, so technically it wasn't deleted. Do you think reiserfsck could still find the file? maybe if I actually delete it? Link to comment
SSD Posted March 9, 2015 Share Posted March 9, 2015 No idea. I have never tried it. I have only used reiserfsck to recover from a more fundamental disk corruption that destroys the beginning of the disk and renders the entire disk unusable. A little help from reiserfsck to rebuild the superblock at the beginning and suddenly the disk is magically restored. You should be able to search the internet for undelete files from RFS and find more. If you overwrote the file literally the file is gone. But if the FS wrote the new file to a different place on the disk, and just used the same name, the old file's contents are still there. This is a very long shot IMO. But obviously I have no idea of the criticality of the file. Was it written to a data disk? To the USB stick? Does it contain a string of characters that is somewhat unique and might be usable to search for data from the file? Is it is a text file where finding the data would be helpful, or is it a binary file that would require bit for bit recovery to be helpful? Link to comment
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