As most of you know, Ext3 file system don’t have to be defragmented like the FAT32 or NTFS file systems. This is a nice feature – but this has a bad side effect as well. You cannot recover deleted files. This is a good trade-off in a server environment. Its not practical to run a defragmenter on a live server. It might take hours to complete – and disk access will not be allowed in that time. And most server environment have very strong backup mechanisms – so data recovery is not a big issue. But when it comes to the desktop environment, this is a very Bad Thing.
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