News 

April 2004: version 0.82 released

This release adds large file support (LFS) in order to access file system images that are larger than 2 GByte. I hope that this does not break anything else.

If you're using an earlier version of e2undel, please evaluate version 0.82 (either on file system images or on "real" file systems), and send me a note "works" or "does not work". Thank you!

This version fixes a bug introduced with e2undel 0.8 that sometimes prevents the recovery of deleted files by name. If you're using the undel library enclosed in the e2undel package, you should upgrade; if you don't, you're not concerned.

 If you just deleted this important file ... 

First of all: Unmount the file system where the deleted file was stored on to prevent that the deleted file's data is overwritten while working on its recovery. Then read the deleted files recovery howto to find out what to do.

 About e2undel 

e2undel is an interactive console tool that recovers the data of deleted files on an ext2 file system under Linux. Included is a library that allows to recover deleted files by name. It does not require any knowledge about the secrets of the ext2 file system and should be useable by everyone. Read the installation and usage notes. If you are interested in learning how e2undel does its job, read here.

e2undel does not manipulate internal ext2 structures and requires only read access to the file system where the files to recover are located. It accesses the ext2 file system by way of Ted Ts'o's ext2fs library; so I think ist is safe to use.

The e2undel package contains a library that allows you to recover deleted files by their names. Usually, when a file is deleted, its name is lost; after installing this library, the names of deleted files are logged and accessible via the e2undel program.

e2undel was written by Oliver Diedrich. Its project page and the source code is hosted on

If you encounter some problems while using e2undel, find a bug, miss some features, or need help, please post a message in the appropriate forum at the project page. If you use the program and find it helpful, please send me a short note.