And it worked -- despite the dire warnings from the ext3
FAQ about the near impossibility of undeleting from ext3 partitions. But
a few things worked in my favour here: OpenOffice files are zip files 'under
the hood', and magicrescue
knows how to deal with certain file formats via its collection of 'recipes'
(which one can extend), and zip is among the shipped recipes. Also, I still
had the 'ls -l' session in one konsole
tab so I knew the exact file size I was looking for. And I wasn't in a
hurry. So this morning, after magicrescue had faithfully
restored 4479 files in over four hours, its companion magicsort
then filtered these into a handful of directories, one of which was
'OpenDocument Text' -- which contained a few files, including two versions of
the desired file as well as copies of the version from the previous
meeting. Nice. And OpenOffice gladly
opened the file. Lastly, it cetainly helped that I happened to have a lurking
debian-devel irc session open where --- where Paul not only caught my remark,
but almost immediately suggested to try magicrescue. So here goes a
well-earned Thank You to Paul!