

The most significant improvement in Ext3 versus Ext2 was the introduction of “journaling,” while Ext4 brings more changes to important system structures, such as those meant to store file data. In many aspects, Ext4 means more progress from Ext3, than Ext3 did in comparison with Ext2. Read this article to find out which of them can do better when it comes to recovering lost information from the hard disk.Įxt4 has evolved from Ext3, the most popular file system for Linux. Below, we will present the test results for each tool. We have selected some of the most popular data recovery solutions which you may wish to use, and conducted a few tests. In our case, immediate action means you should stop writing data to the disk from where the important information was removed, and find a reliable app to help you bring the files back.


That is why it’s important to take immediate action right after you discover important information was lost. The probability of recovering data from such systems depends largely on the size of the journal and on how long the operating system worked after a certain file was deleted. Journaled file systems Ext3 and Ext4 perform the deleting operations via the journal. One of the features within Ext2 is that the file system removes partially the information about deleted files, in particular, links to file names, which makes recovering such file names an almost impossible task. The main descriptor table of a group of blocks is removedīy default, most modern Linux distributives use the Ext4 file system, in the same way as older distributives typically used Ext3 or Ext2 file systems, and the whole thing started one day in the past with them using the original Ext system.Tests and benchmarks for data recovery tools.File system structure and the algorithm used to find the lost data.
