Undelete accidentally deleted records in Sqlite3

Question

As title, possible? I have by accident deleted another record due to my ugly html interface in FireFox. The bad thing is this record delete is a root folder which the program automatically cascade delete everything :(

Answer 1

No way. Without a working backup you won't be able to restore this.

Answer 2

Unfortunately I don't know of a way, either. However, until you do a VACUUM on the SQLite database file the deleted data is generally not technically removed. Perhaps you might be able to still recover some of the data using some sort of hex editor on the file.

Answer 3

Sorry -- nope. Backups are the only option I know of.

In the future, consider never issuing DELETE queries, especially from user-accessible forms (let only the DB admin do it, if anyone) -- just include a field in your tables that marks a record as inactive and then factor that in to your queries in the WHERE clause.

Answer 4

It might be possible to go in and see the data via a hex-editor. The only info I could find said that metadata was gone so the records weren't going to come back, but the data itself might still be there. It has a lot to do with how important the data is, I suspect it's not important enough for you to dig out a hex editor.

Answer 5

The data isn't always removed from the file straightaway. If there's lots of it and you're desperate, you could use the UNIX command strings on the file. This may help you to recover various bits and pieces of human-readable data, but it'll be a hard and inaccurate process.