[Info-vax] ODS-5 data/file recovery

[Hein RMS van den Heuvel]

On Friday, February 15, 2013 10:16:36 AM UTC-5, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2013-02-15, MG <marcogbNO at SPAMxs4all.nl> wrote:
> 
> > Recently, during a strangely botched file transfer via CIFS, a file was 
> > somehow removed in the process (and wasn't successfully transferred
>
> Image backup will not preserve your disk in this case;
:
> What you want is a physical backup of the disk.

Right. Image backup goes for cleanly accessible files only, physical backup may get you the lost bytes, the tricky part will be to find them, all of them.

>>  I also noticed that I could see string of 
the file (or filename, rather) that became 'lost' 

The name could have been found in (possibly stale) directory blocks where they can give you a clue about the file-id, which you can use to calculate the file header location in INDEXF.SYS.
They name could also have been found in that (stale) header.
>From the header you can find mapping pointers to point to the (possibly re-used) datablocks.
But that's what DFU Undelete would have attempted and it failed.
Hmm, this is unlikely to be a successful exercise, unless there is a pattern in the ZIP file contents to be recognized. Like if this was an RMS indexed file then you can glue it back together from raw block, looking for reasonable looking bucket header.

Best of luck!

Met vriendelijk groeten,
Hein