[mythtv-users] recovery of files and filenames from ext4 partition

[Dan Wilga]

On 2/17/15 4:38 AM, Mark Perkins wrote:
> Just thought I would give a quick update on where I got to with my crashed
> hard disk.
>
> Testdisk worked quite well for me (thanks Doug). I had about 1.8TB of
> recordings on the drive. On the first pass Testdisk was able to recover 387
> of 498 missing recordings including one of two recordings that I really
> wanted (most things I really want get watched quickly after recording, the
> stuff that sits there for a long time tends to be well down the viewing
> order). The recordings were missing their file names and extensions but I
> wrote a script that checked the file size and the number of frames and
> matched those to the database to get the correct names back (I assumed
> everything was mpg because I only had recordings on the drive and I deleted
> everything less than a couple hundred MB because the preview png get
> regenerated automatically anyway).
After a filesystem problem a couple of years ago where I lost a bunch of 
filenames, I started running this script in cron.daily:

/bin/ls -ARi / 2> /dev/null | gzip > /ls-ARi.gz

It gzips a full directory listing with inode numbers. That way, things 
left in lost+found without a proper filename can be renamed.