Unix tip: Rescuing files from lost+found
The lost+found directory included in (Unix) file systems is usually empty. Only used when fsck doesn't know what to do with files that have lost their place in the file system, they stand as a temporary holding place for those rare instances in which fsck can't put everything back together after file systems have become corrupt in some way. If you see files in lost+found, you can expect them to look rather unusual. Take these files found on a Solaris 9 system after a panic and a subsequent fsck:
-rw-r--r-- 1 johndoe staff 1576 Apr 22 11:26 #00805349 -rw-r--r-- 1 johndoe staff 4363 Apr 22 11:26 #00805350 -rw-r--r-- 1 johndoe staff 4566 Apr 22 11:26 #00805351
The names of these files were lost before fsck tried to piece things back together. The directory that had originally contained the salvaged files was, for some reason, not recoverable. And, since filenames are stored in directory files and nowhere else on ufs file systems, what we are able to recover for these files are the various pieces of information stored in the files' inodes — the owners, groups, access permissions and pointers to the files' contents.
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Untrue
Most of what you wrote is highly inaccurate and very incomplete. And when someone begins looking in their lost+found folder its for a reason,not just to look around. So, you should have taken any inquiries more to heart.People looking for recovery of large groups of files that are listed here need methods of recovery not inaccurate commands that result in errors and a passe way of measuring the importance of the files that might be located here.
Lost+found
Jim, I wish you would have clarified what was inaccurate and provided some resources and more information. I thought the article was very incomplete, to the point of not being useful to anyone even halfway command line savvy. Other than mentioning the filenames representing inode numbers, the rest of the article was fluff. It was rather disappointing considering the poster is co-author of the O'Reilly Backup and Reocvery book.The kind of information I expected to find was, "How do you piece those lost+found files back together with any precision if they are pieces of binary files?" That would have been very useful for anyone trying to dig out from a corrupt file system. Of course the real answer is, keep a current backup with tested recovery routines to reconstruct a drive after such a "crash."
Please shsre what you know regarding recovery with lost+found files. Thanks!
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