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man pages section 1M: System Administration Commands Oracle Solaris 11.1 Information Library |
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man pages section 1M: System Administration Commands Oracle Solaris 11.1 Information Library |
- recover a deleted file from an NTFS volume
ntfsundelete [options] device
The ntfsundelete utility can, under the right circumstances, recover a deleted file from an NTFS volume. The command has three modes of operation:
The default mode, scan simply reads an NTFS Volume and looks for files that have been deleted. It then displays a list, giving the inode number, name, and size of each deleted file.
The undelete mode takes the files either matching the regular expression (option -m) or specified by the inode-expressions and recovers as much of the data as possible. It saves the result to another location.
The “wizard's” option. Saves a portion of the MFT to a file, which can be useful when debugging ntfsundelete.
There are many circumstances under which ntfsundelete is unable to recover a file. For example, consider the following scenario. When a file is deleted the MFT Record is marked as not in use and the bitmap representing the disk usage is updated. If the power is not turned off immediately, the free space, where the file used to reside might get overwritten. Worse, the MFT Record might be reused for another file. If this happens, it is impossible to tell where the file was on disk.
Even if all the clusters of a file are not in use, there is no guarantee that they have not been overwritten by some short-lived file.
ntfsundelete cannot recover compressed or encrypted files. During a scan, it will display such a file as being 0% recoverable.
In NTFS, all filenames are stored as Unicode. A filename is converted into the current locale for display by ntfsundelete. The utility has successfully displayed Chinese pictogram filenames and then correctly recovered them.
In rare circumstances, a single MFT Record will not be large enough to hold the metadata describing a file (a file would have to be in hundreds of fragments for this to happen). In these cases, one MFT record might hold the filename, while another will hold the information about the data. ntfsundelete will not try and piece together such records. It will simply list unnamed files with data.
To recover a file, ntfsundelete has to read the file's metadata. Unfortunately, when a file is deleted, the metadata can be left in an inconsistent state. For example, the file size might be recorded as zero; the creation date of a file might be set to the time it was deleted or to a random time. In such situations, ntfsundelete picks the largest file size it finds and writes that to disk. It also tries to set the file's creation date to the last-modified date. This date might be the correct last modified date, or something unexpected.
Supported options are listed below. Most options have both single-letter and full-name forms. Multiple single-letter options that do not take an argument can be combined. For example, -fv is the equivalent of -f -v. A full-name option can be abbreviated to a unique prefix of its name.
Fill in the parts of unrecoverable file clusters with byte represented by num. The default is zeros.
Make filename search, when attempting a match with the -–match option, case-sensitive. The default filename search is case-insensitive.
This “wizard” option writes a block of MFT FILE records to a file. The default file is mft which will be created in the current directory. This option can be combined with the --output and --destination options.
Specify the location of the output file for the --copy and --undelete options.
Overrides some sensible defaults, such as not overwriting an existing file. Use this option with caution.
Show a list of options with a brief description of each one.
Recover the files within the specified range of inode numbers. range can be a single inode number, several numbers separated by commas, or a range separated by a dash (-).
Filter the output by looking only for filenames that match pattern. The pattern can include the wildcards ?, matching exactly one character, or *, matching zero or more characters. By default, the matching is case-insensitive. To make the search case-sensitive, use the --case option.
Recover parts of the file even if they are currently marked as in use.
Set the name of the output file created by the --copy or --undelete options.
Display the parent directory of a deleted file.
Filter the output of the --scan option by matching only files with num percent of recoverable content.
Reduce the amount of output to a minimum. This option is not useful with the --scan option.
Search through an NTFS volume and display a list of files that could be recovered. This is the default action of ntfsundelete. This list can be filtered by filename, size, percentage recoverable, or last modification time, using the --match, --size, --percent, and --time options, respectively.
In the output from this option, the %age (percentage) field displays how much of a file can potentially be recovered.
Filter the output of the --scan option by looking for a particular range of file sizes. range can be specified as two numbers separated by a hyphen (-). A unit of size can be abbreviated using the suffixes k, m, g, and t, for kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, and terabytes respectively.
Filter the output of the --scan option. Match only files that have been altered since this time. The time must be given as number and a suffix of d, w, m, or y for, respectively, days, weeks, months, or years.
The default behavior of ntfsundelete is to round up a file's size to the nearest cluster (which will be a multiple of 512 bytes). In cases where the utility has complete data about the size of a file, this option restores the file to exactly that size.
Specifies undelete mode. You can specify the files to be recovered using by using --match or --inodes options. This option can be combined with --output, --destination, and --byte.
When the file is recovered it will be given its original name, unless the --output option is used.
Increase the amount of output that ntfsundelete displays.
Display the version number, copyright, and license for ntfsundelete.
Example 1 Searching for Deleted Files
The following command searches for deleted files on a specific device.
# ntfsundelete /dev/dsk/c0d0p1
Example 2 Scanning for Files Matching a Wildcard
The following command searches for deleted files that match *.doc.
# ntfsundelete /dev/dsk/c0d0p1 -s -m '*.doc'
Example 3 Searching for Files of a Certain Size
The following command looks for deleted files between 5000 and 6000000 bytes, with at least 90% of the data recoverable, on /dev/dsk/c0d0p1.
# ntfsundelete /dev/dsk/c0d0p1 -S 5k-6m -p 90
Example 4 Searching for Recently Changed Files
The following command searches for deleted files altered in the last two days.
# ntfsundelete /dev/dsk/c0d0p1 -t 2d
Example 5 Specifying an Inode Range
The following command undeletes inodes 2, 5 and 100 to 131 of device /dev/sda1.
# ntfsundelete /dev/sda1 -u -i 2,5,100-131
Example 6 Specifying an Output File and Directory
The following command undeletes inode number 3689, names the file work.doc, and stores it in the user's home directory.
# ntfsundelete /dev/dsk/c0d0p1 -u -i 3689 -o work.doc -d ~
Example 7 Saving MFT Records
The following command saves MFT records 3689 to 3690 to a file debug.
# ntfsundelete /dev/dsk/c0d0p1 -c 3689-3690 -o debug
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:
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ntfsclone(1M), ntfsresize(1M), parted(1M), attributes(5)
ntfsundelete was written by Richard Russon and Holger Ohmacht, with contributions from Anton Altaparmakov.
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