Depending on the Format of the drive and file system you used, there was a way to undelete stuff in Linux. Of course typing out Inodes is a HUGE pain in the ass like no other (Unless of course you're a moron like me who once had to toggle a Boot Record in Hex, but hey it worked!) it's a carefully crafted art.

This is one reason I have the following Back up plan on my home network:

A Slackware 12 Server running SSH and FTP so whenever something changes on ANY drive in the LAN, it can be uploaded and saved. I used the first computer I ever bought to do it (Pentium 3 733 MHz, 384 MBs RAM, 43 GB HD, and one 160 GB HD) it contains multiple OSs of Unix and Linux and BSD, and has all my MP3s and movies.

A Celeron 433 MHz with 192 RAM running Slackware and dual booting Windows 98 for a game I like that won't work in NT based systems. I setup FTP on it with the 80 GB HD and it has a second back up of the important hard to get back crap.

A USB External Drive, 80 GBs, third copy of most important files only.

Each desktop has another 4th and 5th copy of the most important stuff, and my new machine's huge disk has everything.

A ZIP Drive from way back when that still works good, has smaller copies of the MOST important things.

A bunch of Floppies containing things mostly in text of picture format I can't get back.

Two Gmail accounts... Linux and FreeBSD have a tool that lets you mount your Gmail account as a storage device just as you would a Floppy. You then have 2 GBs of back ups for free and since you can make multiple accounts you have unlimited 2 GB incremented storage.

Online Back up plan for absolute needed things. I think I have my MuttRC ready

Free online web hosting with a crap load of adds..... It sucks but it's free online storage.