Need help with deleted files

Hello. I am having a problem and I was wondering if I could get some help from here. I changed into a directory with the

cd

command and I wanted to delete a folder and all of its subdirectories, so I went ahead and did a

rm --recursive *

in my current directory to realize that I was in the wrong directory, my web server directory. So now I'm thinking, what am I gonna do? Now I know that there are ways to get files back as the computer (well...depending on the OS) doesn't really delete the files completely, it just deletes their references (from my understanding), but I don't wanna have to go through all that hard work and research, so I am wondering, are there any better ways around this that any of y'all know? If so, please inform me as this is a catastrophe for me. Thank you!

what kind of filesystem are you using? if you were using ZFS and had snapshots configured, you could recover. Sorry to hear about your "rm" misadventure.

I'm using ext4, unless that's not what you mean...

ext4, ok...try these, although I have not used either, so your mileage may vary. Plus you may want to mount the FS read only ASAP, so that it can prevent any more writes. Basically your recovery chances are maximixed if the underlying inode data structure is preserved and no more changes are allowed.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_6.11_Release

http://extundelete.sourceforge.net/