extundelete : How can i recover "recoverable inodes still lost"?

Question

I am using extundelete to recover about 9000 files that were deleted from an AWS EBS volume, accidentally via programmatic error.

The end of the report states

2864 recoverable inodes still lost.

Can anyone explain what this means, and how I can recover the unrecoverable using extundelete

Full shell output

NOTICE: Extended attributes are not restored.
Loading filesystem metadata ... 240 groups loaded.
Loading journal descriptors ... 30077 descriptors loaded.
Searching for recoverable inodes in directory /srv/www/mysite.com/photo-gallery ...
9000 recoverable inodes found.
Looking through the directory structure for deleted files ...
Unable to restore inode 330 (srv/www/mysite.com/photo-gallery/group56/myimage7.jpg): Space has been reallocated.
Unable to restore inode 1179649 (srv/www/mysite.com/photo-gallery/group189/myimage5.jpg): Space has been reallocated.
2864 recoverable inodes still lost.

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/

Based on your question, I would guess that you ran extundelete with --restore directory /srv/www/mysite.com/photo-gallery

If that's the case, then you would replace all of that with --restore-all, e.g.

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.