Help!

Is there any way to recover files from a deleted container? Long story short, I found the behavior of `podman network rm -f` unexpected, and it wound up deleting most of my containers. One in particular had a month of work in it (I was using it as a development environment), and it turns out only part of it was backed up. I’m desperate!

This is Podman for Windows, so most of the files on the “host” are in the WSL environment. I can get into that no problem with `wsl -d podman-machine-default`.

As an added wrinkle, my default connection was `podman-machine-default-root`, but I was was not running Podman rootful. I’m not sure this is particularly relevant.

grep-ing for strings which are unique to the development environment shows one hit in Windows, in %HOME%/.local/containers/podman/machine/wsl/wsldist/podman-machine-default/ext4.vhdx - which I assume is the file system for the WSL layer itself. I made a copy of it.

A grep within WSL itself doesn’t show so any hits, so it’s possible the files were deleted as far as WSL is concerned. I tried searching for an EXT4 undelete tool, but the only one I found (extundelete) is from 10+ years ago and doesn’t appear to work anymore.

I haven’t stopped WSL (I’m using /tmp as a staging area) or restarted the computer.

I’m at wit’s end. I really don’t know where to begin or look to recover these files, which I really, really need. Any recovery suggestions (no matter how tedious) would be welcome.

I know it’s too late to change now, but man, the behavior of `podman network remove` is unexpected.

Thanks,
Alvin
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