Situation

I deleted a great number of files with Ranger and now I am trying to use ext4magic to recover them. I am on Ubuntu 20.04, and I am not a power user. :)

I have a single drive with two partitions where I store everything on sda2 only.

user@machine$ mount | grep /dev/sd
/dev/sda2 on / type ext4 (rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro)
/dev/sda1 on /boot/efi type vfat (rw,relatime,fmask=0077,dmask=0077,codepage=437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,errors=remount-ro)

Now, the files I deleted were under /home/username/Downloads/compressed.

Preparation

In order to ext4magic even consider this drive I had to do the following (based on this answer):

1. Launch recovery at boot and choose 'root mode'
2. Mount an external drive and navigate to there
3. Change the sda2 status to read-only with mount -o remount,ro /dev/sda2
4. run ext4magic

Problem

ext4magic does not seem to recognize the directory where I deleted the files.

root@barat:/mnt# ext4magic /dev/sda2 -a $(date -d "-1 days" +%s) -f home/username/Downloads/compressed -l
Filesystem in use: /dev/sda2
Using internal Journal at Inode 8
Activ Time after : Wed Mar 3 19:36:06 2021
Activ Time before : Thu Mar 4 19:36:06 2021
Warning: error-NR 2133571476 can not found file: home/username/Downloads
Error: Inode not found for "home/username/Downloads/compressed"
Check the valid PATHNAME "home/username/Downloads/compressed" and the BEFORE option "Thu Mar 4 19:36:06 2021"
ext4magic : EXIT_SUCCESS

To be more precise, it does not recognize its 'parent' directory (i.e. "Downloads").

Strangely, however, it does show me a list of files when I try it on the home directory (that is, one of its parent):

ext4magic /dev/sda2 -a $(date -d "-1 days" +%s) -f home/username -l

This list contains files from other subdirectories of the home folder (e.g. .local) and it seems to show files deleted much earlier. However, I do not see any mention of files from the "Downloads" directory.

(There is a similar issue in this post, but without any error message and without an answer).

Question

What is happening here and what can I do to recover the deleted files?

Update

I also tried to use debugfs (and there 'lsdel') to find deleted inodes (based on this answer) but it came up empty.

Sorted by: Reset to default

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