How do I recover files from EXT2/EXT3 drive?

The EXT2 or second extended file system is a file system for the Linux kernel. It is initially designed as a replacement for the extended file system. It is fast enough that it is used as the benchmarking standard. Its main drawback is that it is not a journaling file system. Its successor, EXT3, is a journal file system and is almost completely compatible with EXT2.

The EXT3 or third extended file system is a journal file system that is coming into increasing use among users of the Linux operating system. It is the default file system for the Red Hat, Fedora and Debian Linux distributions. Why to migrate from EXT2 to EXT3? Four main reasons: availability, data integrity, speed, and easy transition.

Although its performance and scalability is less attractive than many of its competitors such as ReiserFS and XFS it does have the significant advantage in that it allows in-place upgrades from the popular EXT2 file system without having to backup and restore data.

The EXT3 file system adds, over its predecessor:

• A journal
• H-tree (hashed tree) directory indexes
• In-directory file types

Without these, any EXT3 file system is also a valid EXT2 file system. This has allowed well-tested and mature file system maintenance utilities (like fsck) for maintaining and repairing EXT2 file systems to also be used with EXT3 without major changes. It also makes conversion between the two file systems (both forward to EXT3 and backward to EXT2) straightforward.

There are three levels of journaling available in the Linux implementation of EXT3:

• Journal, where both metadata and file contents are written to before being committed to the main file system. This improves reliability at a performance penalty because all data has to be written twice.
• Writeback, where metadata is journaled but file contents are not. This is faster but introduces the hazard of out-of-order writes where, for example, files being appended to during a crash may gain a tail of garbage on the next mount.
• Ordered, just like writeback, but file contents are forcedly written into the origins files after its associated metadata, which is an acceptable compromise between reliability and performance, so this is the default.

To recover files from Linux EXT2/EXT3 drive, please follow this procedure:

Step 1. Launch EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard and select disk partition or storage location where you lost data and click "Scan".

Step 2. EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard will start a quick scan first;
After the quick scan, a deep scan will automatically start to find more data;

Step 3. Preview and restore lost data;
You can preview found data by file types, select found data and click "Recover" to save them to another safe spot in PC/storage device.

Caution: Saving file(s) to the partition or drive from where you are recovering data, for it may result in overwriting of data, and would result in permanent data loss!