Efficient Recovery of Deleted Data and Metadata from XFS and Btrfs Filesystem
Syed Vaheed Ali, P M D Ali Khan, Guluguluri Rajasekhar, Venutharla Sasidhar · 2025
Data loss due to accidental deletion or file system corruption is an ever-present concern in digital storage systems. While much research has focused on recovering deleted file data, the recovery of associated metadata, such as timestamps, file permissions, and extended attributes, has been largely overlooked. This paper proposes a comprehensive approach to the recovery of deleted data and metadata from two widely used Linux file systems—XFS and Btrfs. We develop a robust recovery framework that leverages file system-specific tools, coupled with custom recovery algorithms, to retrieve both deleted files and their metadata. Through a series of controlled experiments involving different file types, including text, audio, and video files, we validate the effectiveness of our method. Our results show that XFS is generally more conducive to full recovery, with high data and metadata restoration rates. However, Btrfs poses more challenges, especially in handling snapshots and copy-on-write mechanisms. This work contributes to advancing the field of data recovery by addressing the growing need for metadata recovery in modern file systems.