I've written my own custom data recovery tools to recover lost files. The first was a hack of ddrescue to only recover sectors containing a certain string (bec

I've written my own custom data recovery tools to recover lost files. The first was a hack of ddrescue to only recover sectors containing a certain string (because the drive had so many bad sectors that a full ddrescue would have taken weeks to complete). Recently I wrote a tool to recover deleted directory contents from ext file systems that works even if all the inodes are gone. I didn't need the file data, only the names and folder structure, and I realized that if you don't need the data you never need to dereference the inodes. Instead you can treat the inode number like a database key to cross reference directory blocks.