Comment by leecarraher

rm just unlinks the files at the inode level, seems like a disk forensics utility like the imagerec suite could have restored alot of the 'lost' data. In fact i've done it on source code after learning that the default behavior of untar was to overwrite all of your current directory structure. since it was text i didnt need anything fancy like imagerec, instead i just piped the raw disk to grep, and looked for parts i knew were in files i needed, then output them and the surrounding data to an external hard drive.