Re: A way to recover deleted files (just contents) from USF2

> Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2004 07:50:25 -0500
> From: Steve Ames <steve_at_energistic.com>
> Sender: owner-freebsd-current_at_freebsd.org
> 
> On Tue, Apr 20, 2004 at 08:14:23PM +0800, Xin LI wrote:
> > On Tue, Apr 20, 2004 at 12:26:32PM +0200, Oliver Brandmueller wrote:
> > > This is a FAQ. Und the frequent answer is:
> > > 
> > > You can easily recover valuable data after accsional deletion from your 
> > > backup. If you don't have a backup, then your data don't seem to be woth 
> > > having them backed up.
> > 
> > Some Unix coursebooks even comment the result of accidentialy removal of
> > a file without backing up as "User should take this as a lesson".
> 
> That's kinda silly. Unless files are backed up at every edit then most of
> us only have periodic filesystem backups. Lets say I just download a 150M
> file and then accidentally delete it. Rather than wasting time and bandwidth
> downloading again it'd be simpler to just 'unrm' it. Odds are that diskspace
> and even inode haven't been recycled yet.

Gee. VMS did this years ago. (So did MANY other, less common systems.)
Instead of expecting editor to make their own copy of the old file, ALL
files has version numbers and the default mode of creating a file with
the same name as an existing file name was to create a new version
(leaving the old version alone.)

While there were many capabilities on VMS that I miss, the loss of file
version as a basic part of the file system is second only to the VMS
distributed lock manager.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman_at_es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634