giis-ext4

giis-ext4 (also known as gET iT i sAY for EXT4) is an open source command-line utility, a standalone version of the original giis (gET iT i sAY) utility, especially designed to be used for recovering data from EXT4 filesystems.

What is giis?

giis (gET iT i sAY) is an open source command-line tool written in C, using SQLite and the ext2fs library, and designed to be used for recovering lost (deleted) data from Linux filesystems, such as EXT3 and EXT4.

It is also known as an undelete tool that can recover files from your hard disk drive. The application is engineered in such a way that it can recover files owned by a specific user, as well as files of a specific type.

Designed for the EXT4 filesystem

As its name suggests, giis-ext4 has been designed from the ground up to support the powerful EXT4 filesystem, which is the standard Linux filesystem used by default on numerous distributions of GNU/Linux.

Getting started with giis-ext4

giis-ext4 can be easily installed on any Linux kernel-based operating system that uses the EXT4 filesystem. Simply download the latest release, save the archive on your Home directory, extract its contents using an archive manager utility, and open a Terminal app.

In the terminal emulator, use the ‘cd’ command to go to the location where you’ve extracted the archive file (e.g cd /home/softoware/giis-ext4) and run the ‘make’ command to compile the program.

Command-line options

After a successful installation, run the ‘giis-ext4 --help’ command to use the application, which doesn’t require installation. The aforementioned command will display the program’s usage message and available command-line options.

Using these options, you will be able to undelete and recover files, list deleted files, update the program to reflect the current filesystem state, as well as to install or uninstall the software on your machine.

What is new in this release:

• Now md5sum is applied for file paths with whitespace.

What is new in version 1.1:

• This version supports file protection and recovery from non-root partitions.

What is new in version 1.0:

• mtab parsing now works with openSUSE.
• Un-modified directories are no longer scanned during updates, improving performance.

What is new in version 0.8:

• This version adds a locking mechanism in order to avoid sqlite3 db corruption.

What is new in version 0.7:

• The md5sum of the original file is stored in the log file.
• A user can use this detail and check the md5sum of the recovered file and verify it.

What is new in version 0.6:

• The "list" option was added to show a list of deleted files.
• Recovered files are trimmed to the correct size, not necessarily a multiple of block size.

What is new in version 0.4:

• Fixed a bug.