Why use extundelete?
extundelete is a complex program that makes data recovery from an ext3 or ext4 partition simple. Most people are able to recover their files by running one command from the terminal, as explained in the next section. extundelete was the first program able to restore both the contents and the file name of a deleted file on an ext4 partition. ext3grep was the first program to use the filesystem's journal to recover data, and much of its code is shared by extundelete, but ext3grep only worked for ext3 partitions and could take hours to start recovering files if the files were on a large partition. extundelete, by contrast, starts recovering files immediately after parsing the filesystem's journal, usually within a minute or two after starting the program. ext4magic is a program to recover files that was based on extundelete, and has a slightly different set of features and limitations. extundelete makes heavy use of the ext2fs library, which allows it to automatically support many features of ext3 and ext4 file systems.