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Date:      Mon, 05 Jun 2000 20:24:00 -0600
From:      Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>
To:        James Howard <howardjp@glue.umd.edu>
Cc:        Narvi <narvi@haldjas.folklore.ee>, Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr>, "Thomas M. Sommers" <tms2@mail.ptd.net>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Undelete in Unix (Was: Re: Why encourage stupid people to  use *BSD)
Message-ID:  <4.3.2.7.2.20000605201724.04a17ea0@localhost>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.21.0006051839410.22202-100000@y.glue.umd.edu>
References:  <4.3.2.7.2.20000605142053.04aa2ee0@localhost>

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At 04:40 PM 6/5/2000, James Howard wrote:

>> I'd do it with an lkm that hooked syscalls.
>
>DOS did deletioning by zeroing the first character of the file name and
>undeleted it by giving that character a value again.  

It was able to do this because directory entries were in a linear list
and were not immediately reused. Unfortunately, if a file had a 
single-letter name, its directory entry could not be recovered. 

After the system had been running for awhile, disk space for new files 
was allocated at the "end" of the disk. This increased recoverability 
of a file's data clusters at the expense of fragmentation. Unfortunately, 
deleted files eventually DID get "clobbered," and you never knew when 
this would occur. (It was more probable that deleted files would get 
clobbered after an intervening reboot, since the search for free space 
was restarted at the "beginning" of the disk at boot time.)

In short, undeletion under DOS was a kludge and somewhat of a black art.
An undelete system should be more reliable than this.

--Brett



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