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‘Undelete’ is an option to recover and restore the lost or deleted files form the computer by rewinding the operation. Without the in-built undelete feature, the retrieval of lost or deleted files is termed as data recovery and in Linux operating system based computers, it is popularly known as Linux data recovery.

There are many file systems, which have the built-in undelete feature to reverse an accidental-delete operation of important data. However, this feature is not available with every file system. Moreover, though the undelete feature is very much useful for the ones who have deleted some important files/folders, as it may happen during file conversion from jpg to pdf, and at the very next moment, realize that the data was extremely important to be recovered back, the feature also alarms for a security risk.

Many operating systems with graphical user interface has a concept of ‘holding area’. If a file or folder has been deleted, then the information regarding these files move to the ‘holding area’ and are periodically deleted. In case of Windows and Macintosh operating systems, similar concept exists in the form of ‘Trash’. Though some of the recent Linux versions also have the undelete feature, still most of the command based operating systems, such as DOS, Linux and UNIX does not support undelete and leave the recovery of data upto recovery utilities, such as Linux recovery.

Some Linux file systems like ext2 has an in-built recovery feature called ‘e2undel’ which can undelete many recently deleted data from the ext2 file system based Linux computers. Similarly, in case of ext3 file system in Linux, though the ‘ext3grep’ utility has been designed to automate the undelete kind of operation, officially, ext3 does not support undelete. Apart from these two file systems, all the others file systems in Linux, such as ext4, reiserFS etc. does not have any undelete feature.

Hence, if you encounter any instance of data deletion in Linux, you need to opt for any data recovery Linux utility, such as ext2 recovery, ext3 recovery or ext4 recovery.

These Linux Undelete Tools are designed with powerful scanning algorithms to search your storage device extensively and recover the lost or deleted data efficiently. Moreover, these utilities are absolutely risk-free and do not harm neither the media nor the data in it.

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