Frank's Technotes

UFS2 version of ffsrecov for FreeBSD.

I just released a heavily modified version of John-Mark Gurney's ffsrecov, adapted to use libufs and to work (only) with UFS2 file systems. I call it ffs2recov and it is available here.

I wrote this a couple of years ago so that I could recover a file system that had been stomped by a misconfigured RAID controller. It worked well enough for me to recover a couple of hundred gigabytes worth of data, which was a great relief (although some stuff was gone forever, sigh). I had intended to polish it up and release it long before now, but I've never managed to get around to doing the polishing. In particular, while it has a nice little summary of implemented options, the manpage needs a lot of work.

On the positive side, however, I extended it to be a lot more robust in the face of corrupt pointers and file system offsets, so it doesn't just fall over when it sees garbage in a block address or whatnot.

I'm releasing it under the BSD two-clause license, with due credit to John-Mark. It's my hope that someone else will take it, clean it up a bit, rewrite the manpage and maybe make a port out of it. If you do and you need a place to host the distfile, let me know.

Since I released it, a couple of people have cleaned it up a tiny bit and I've integrated their changes. There's now a port in the FreeBSD ports collection, sysutils/ffs2recov.