Yes, whilst extundelete is not so easy to use, I was very successfull with photorec and autopsy.
Last time I had to revover 2 TB music files for a friend, and photorec gave me all files back. However, i had to rename the filenames to the title of the music, but here puddletag could help. As ypou mentioned, blocks were deleteed, too, so filenames could not be recoverewd any more. For special files you can also use scalpel. It looks for header, then footer and everything between is the file. However, scalpel is not easy to configure. Also foremost is another tool of my favourites, as it is easy to use. And last but not least not to forget about testdisk (for lost partitions) ans autopsy (latest version!) are doing great jobs. Ah, and the suite I am working with is CAINE and also KALI, because these are livefile systems and this is necessary, as you want to rescue files from an unmounted device. Best Hans > Have you tried these tools in action? I believe that removing files from > ext4 wipes list of used blocks and explicitly zeroes size in inode > records, so a chance of recovery is quite low. Some info for recently > accessed files may be restored from filesystem journal. In the case of > contiguous block spans signature-based search (e.g. photorec from the > testdisk package) may find some files, but they will be buried in the > heap of false positives without any hints related to file names and > directory structures. > > I am quite skeptical concerning fraction of successfully recovered files.
