gET iT i sAY - giis

"First they criticize you,Then they laugh at you,Then they fight with you,Then you win." - M.K.Gandhi

Overview

giis (gET iT i sAY) is a Linux (Ext3/Ext2) file undelete/recovery tool.Once installed, files on your hard disk can be recovered using giis.A new functionality automatically restores recovered files into it's original directories-if path exists."But those files which are deleted before the installation of giis can't be recovered using giis".

Awards

giis winner of FOSS India Awards 2008 (aka LinuxAsia).The awards were sponsored by NRCFOSS (National Resource Centre for Free/Open Source Software),to stimulate young minds, encourage innovative contributions to the FOSS ecosystem and address the digital divide.

If you have already deleted a file and not installed giis? - try Carlo wood's ext3grep http://groups.google.com/group/ext3grep/web

giis for ext4 file system will be released in few days time. It will provide better performance than giis for ext3.If you want to get more updates on this . Join giis-user groups .
Note for developers:
Q:Why this giis tool coding style is worst / very poor quality?
A:In summer of 2005,I wanted to write something related to file system, with single aim to learn file system internals _pratically_ not just reading books.
So while writing this tool , i tried to get deeper into ext3 file system internals to understand it.
For example, I want to access directory content.I could use system("ls") and easily get the output.But i learned nothing about the internals.
So decided to get little deeper,yes i found, could use readdir() - but even here i'll pass a struct and get back the values,still don't know about exact directory layout of file system via coding.So decided to go and read the directory directly from hard disk - will helps me understand file system better.
So that's how this tool was written,with intention to learn FileSystem disk layout. My suggestion to any developer, who wants to learn file system in proper manner - try ext2 library , best way to learn FS . :)

Screencasting

Screencasting for giis-gui-0.2 (giis-4.7) is available GUI Installtion and GUI Recovery and also here groups .Please join the group to get latest updates on the tool or post your issues/feedback.
Screencasting for command line version Command line Installtion and recovery -for more screenshots check here ;)

minili

(Sep-17-2009)I'm happy to announce the release of my experimental custom linux - minili - miniMAL liNUX ,alpha version available here

.you can download and burn it to CD/DVD or Try with virtual machines.If everything is fine,all you can do is, to login to this linux and run few basic commands.

Minili Features:*Around 3 MB size (3.8 to be precise) *comes in text mode - no X *Standalone system. *Useful for educational/experimental purpose. *Non-persisant file system.
TODO: *add Networking support *add persistant storage *add X.

Features

0.Recovers Dropped mysql tables.
1.Automatically restores recovered files into it's original directories-if path exists.
2.Recover files Deleted Date on specific date or deleted before/after specific date or even within specific date range.
3.Recover files with their original access permission types and file owner and group details.
4.User friendly configuration file which supports adding new directories even after installation.
5.Recover deleted files of all users.
6.Recover deleted files of a specific user.
7.Recovery of files based on the File type (gif,cpp,c).
8.Recovers deleted system files or hidden files.
9.Forensic analyzer is provided to assist data dump from the harddisk. If contents are modified or overwritten , during recovery user has the option to compare to old file data with current disk data using giis dump option.
10.Provides list of deleted files and it's restore path.
11.Displays your current file system details.
12.If file is modified ,it allows user to decide whether to retrieve latest version of deleted file or older version.
13.Allows user to choose directories (other than /root and /home) that can be protected by giis.
14.All newly created files and directory are added,as time limit specified in crontab.
Rationale behind the concept
giis takes snapshot of the ext3/ext2 file system at a specified point of time. A full backup of a data will need large disk,If you accidently deleted a file,retrieve it from backup data.
Obvious disadvantage is that backup takes long time to complete and it consumes large disk space.
In order to recover a missing file,such a huge resource utiliztion can be avoided with the help of giis.
giis performs snapshot of the file system 'meta data' not data,hence lot of disk space saved. Thus accidently deleted files are recovered with saved meta data.
Even if the file is fragmented, meaning that the data occupied on the disk is not in sequence,giis can retrieve the file. This process is usually much safer in aiding recovery of deleted files than the data recovery process.

giis on "Linux for you" magazine

Little correction from above story-It says,"decided to develop a piece of software that would showcase his technical ..." In simple terms,i wanted to get a job purely based on my average programming skills and nothing else. :D
giis has few subscribers too(at freshmeat.net),I wonder,whether people subscribed to the tool with a hope "at least next version should work, as all previous versions didn't work at all " :-)

Donations

As I didn't write giis tool to earn money,so you are not obliged to pay for using it. However,If you like to support Free software movement,I would like to receive donations that will allow me to write more programs with greater freedom.;)
Here a list of individuals and organizations supported my open source activites through donations.- I really thanks them for their support ;) (I have received Rs25,000 For my FOSS India Award and Received 10USD from www.Sourceforge.net- )

Donator	Date	Amount	Comment
List of Donations
SEO Forum	24/09/2009	50USD	Open Source Support

Diskspace and Time taken by giis
Though diska space and time purely dependent on system configuration and amount of data the machine has. Here is the result of test run i did on my linux experimental kid :-)
System Configurations:
Intel Celeron 1.73GHz,512MB RAM,80 HDD
Following directories with data,(For up-to 7 directory level,)
/root has 19.5 GB (Since I'm root ;-)) and
/home has 43MB and
/var has 226MB
Time Line:
Installation took 2 minutes 23 seconds.
Update took 1 minute 8 seconds.
Disk Usage:
giis Meta file size : 2.5 MB
Conclusion :
For approxmiate 20 GB of Hard disk data ,giis occupied 2.5 MB.
Criteria for recovery
When a file is deleted on a ext3 file system, its directory entry is skipped,with inode number is zeroed out.File's inode will contains,time stamp, file length but most importantly data location on the disk is deleted and inode is marked as available for use by other files created or modified thereafter.
File content from disk location still remain (unless some erased the file using commands like shred),if you know exact location of file ,you can still retrieve it.
Following conditions must be met for a successful recovery of the file:
* The file's location on the disk formerly used by the deleted file must not be overwritten yet by other files. If a new file had been written into,those location.Then file content can't be recovered by any tool or software.