Need help for extundelete

Question

Following is the output and command, I am trying to recover a shift deleted folder from home in sda1 , currently logged in via live CD Ubuntu 18.04

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo extundelete --restore-directory /home/ /dev/sda1
NOTICE: Extended attributes are not restored.
Loading filesystem metadata ... 1526 groups loaded.
Loading journal descriptors ... 31059 descriptors loaded.
Searching for recoverable inodes in directory /home/ ... 
2440 recoverable inodes found.
Looking through the directory structure for deleted files ... 
2440 recoverable inodes still lost.
No files were undeleted.

Answer 1

From the author of extundelete:

I guess that it is not finding a way to link the inodes with a file name, in which case the --restore-all method is your best shot at getting your files back.

https://sourceforge.net/p/extundelete/mailman/message/30159985/

So in your case, you would instead run:

sudo extundelete /dev/sda1 --restore-all

Although from my experience the output is deceptive because the files (inodes) that are still "lost" are for the whole partition and not just for the directory you specified, meaning that most of what it's able to restore has already been restored. But it doesn't hurt to try --restore-all since it may find some file fragments that it doesn't know the path for.