Recover deleted folder from Google VPS

Question

we have a VPS running on Google Cloud which had a very important folder in a user directory. An employee of ours deleted that folder and we can't seem to figure out how to recover it. I came across extundelete but it seems the partition needs to be unmounted for it to work but I don't understand how I would do it on Google. This project took more than a year and that was the latest copy after a fire which took out the last copy from our local servers.

Could anyone please help or guide me in the right direction?

Answer 1

Getting any files back from your VM's disk may be tricky (at best) or impossible (most probably) if the files got overwritten.

Easiest way would be to get them back from a copy or snapshot of your VM's disk. If you have a snapshot of your disk (either taken manually or automatically) from before when the folder in question got delete then you will get your files back.

If you don't have any backups then you may try to recover the files - I've found many guides and tutorials, let me just link the ones I believe would help you the most:

• Unix/Linux undelete/recover deleted files
• Recovering accidentally deleted files
• Get list of files deleted by rm -rf

First though - make a copy of the disk you want to get your files back from and work on the copy.