The ext4 (Fourth Extended File System) is the successor of the ext3 file system, which is a journaled file system. It was developed as for backward compatible extensions to remove the 64-bit data storage limits. Being a journaled system, it is always a safe bet to use ext4-based systems in a production environment. However, at times data loss still may happen in these systems because of delayed allocation. Also, there are certain other reasons as well, such as human errors, virus infections, accidental removal of data, etc that result in data loss situations. In such cases, you should use a third-party Ext4 Recovery software to perform Linux data recovery of the lost data.

When you delete files from the ext4 file system, the files remain physically intact in the system. Only the pointer of the file system entries is deleted. Due to this, the operation system is not able to find the file at its location and, thus, this position is marked as available in the file system. To recover such deleted files, there are certain methods that you can use.

One such utility is the extundelete utility that analyzes the file system journals to recover the deleted data using ext2fs library. This utility is capable of recovering both the file name and its contents of the deleted file. Hence, it can be concluded that the extundelete utility is a useful and efficient tool.

Having said that, even the extundelete tool does not guarantee complete recovery of the lost data. Moreover, if the ext4 file system is damaged or deleted then you are unable to perform recovery of the lost data. Therefore, in such cases you should use a third-party Linux data recovery software to recover the lost, deleted, and formatted data from ext4 file system. Such read-only tools are able to recover data from all kinds of data loss using fast yet sophisticated scanning algorithms.

Stellar Phoenix Linux Data Recovery is linux data recovery software that enables you to recover lost, deleted, or formatted data from ext4 file systems. Apart from ext4 file systems, it is also capable of performing ext2 recovery and ext3 recovery. It supports various Linux distributions such as Red Hat, SUSE, Debian, Caldera, Mandrake, Sorcerer, TurboLinux, Slackware, Gentoo, etc. This Linux recovery software is able to recover data from various hard drives such as SATA, EIDE, SCSI, and IDE. It is compatible with Windows 7, Vista, Server 2003, XP, and Server 2000.