'mc', the gnu midnight commander is usually installed on most linux desktops (at least the red hat ones)

We had someone accidentially delete *all* of our client databases. then we realized backups were bad. :( Luckly, we knew enough to stop *all* writes to the disk immidiatly, and we let midnight commander do it's trick. (It only works w/ ext2 disks though -- and it recovers by Inode number, not by filename.) We had to sort through all the files by hand to determine whether they were mysql index'es or mysql ISD files, and for which client they belonged. that was a hectic 2 day hack job ;)