Introduction

There may be a time when you have accidentally deleted critical file(s) that do not have backup or the backup is too old. In this case, you can undelete the file with debugfs provided by e2fsprogs. However, you need to gather clues like the time when the file was deleted and the size of the file, etc. If you do not have this information stored anywhere, then you may need to search for all recent deleted inodes manually. This is why Channel 16 provides such interface to make the recovery easier.

Channel 16 is a graphical tool for recovering deleted files under ext2 filesystem. It uses the methods provided by e2fsprogs package. This application provides the following features:

• Browsing interactively for each block inside a deleted inode, allowing the user to peep at the blocks before deciding whether it is the right inode.
• Search & Rescue operation (in the next release) - user can type in content of the deleted file and the program will automatically search for each block in all the deleted inodes.

This graphical tool is implemented in Java Swing, then uses JNI to interface with the libext2fs library.

This document gives a general introduction on how to use this application. By using this application, I do not hold any responsibility for losing any critical files nor corrupting the filesystem.