[imurray]

Having once managed to delete a file with hours of edits just before committing to version control, I opened my 60 GB partition in vim, found the text of the file and copied it out. While this is "stupid" — there will be better ways to do it — searching and recovering with vim worked immediately and easily.

Edit: it's possible I used "less", I can't remember.

[__mlm__]

Can you explain in just a bit more detail how you did this? This sounds really neat. I faced a problem like this a while ago, but luckily the file was still open in emacs (and in an emacs buffer), so I just re-wrote it back to disk.

[imurray]

This was a linux laptop. I immediately powered off and booted with a live CD. To be honest I'm not sure exactly what I did next. I might have just done "less -f /dev/sda5". I think what I actually did was make an image of the partition using dd to an external drive so I would be able to recover the file at leisure. Trying now, it seems that vim won't open a /dev block device directly, but an image is just a regular file.

[nkassis]

Hehe, cool trick, I'll have to try it out someday :)