[NBLUG/talk] Executed "rm -rf *" in the wrong directory!

[Lincoln Peters]

I seem to have accidentally deleted a total of about 5 gigabytes of data
from my /home directory, and now I have to get it back.

The /home directory is attached to a reiserfs filesystem, and I
unmounted it immediately after I realized that it was deleting the wrong
files (and I've only used it when mounted read-only since the incident,
so I'm sure that *all* deleted files are still intact).

Based on a message posted to the Linux-kernel mailing list in 2001, it
looks like I could use the command "reiserfsck --scan-whole-partition
--rebuild-tree /dev/hdc1" to re-link the files, but I'm not willing to
try that until I know that doing so will not make the problem worse, or
I can find a way to image and back up the entire 60GB hard disk
beforehand (and I don't own any other media large enough to back it up).


So, does anyone have any suggestions for recovering this data?  Has
anyone successfully used "reiserfsck --rebuild-tree" before?  Is there
any risk of permanent data loss if it doesn't work?  Is there another
option?