Updated: Automatically restore files from lost+found

Today, in an IRC channel near you, the discussion came to recover files from lost+found somehow. Two years ago I wrote some scripts to automatically recover files from lost+found, so this is some sort of a repost. There are two scripts: one that generates some kind of ls-LR file to have all the information needed for the second script, which restores those files in lost+found to their original folders. Here is the information from the original blog post: 

make-lsLR.sh - call this regularly (cron) to create the needed files that are stored in /root/. Of course you can alter the location easily and exclude other directories from being scanned.

check_lost+found.py - The second script is to be run when your fsck managed to mess up with your files and stored them into lost+found directory. It takes 3 arguments: 1) the source directory where your messed up lost+found directory is, 2) the target directory to which the data will be saved and 3) a switch to actually make it happen instead of a dry-run.

You can find both files as attachment end the end of this blog post.

I've chosen to copy the files to a different place instead of moving them within the same filesystem to their original place for safety reasons. Primary goal is to retrieve the files from lost+found, not to replace a full featured backup and restore application. Because of this the script doesn't handle hard- nor symlinks correctly. It just copy files.

Of course there's still room for improvements, like handling hard-/symlinks correctly or using inode number instead of md5sums to move data back to its prior location. But it works for me[tm] well enough in this way, so I'm satisfied so far. You're welcome, though, to improve this piece of ugliness if you like.

Maybe someone else finds this usefull as well. Use it on your own risk, of course. :)