How can files with a size of 0 bytes be cured?

Question

linux

Hello!
I have a USB flash drive (LUKS, Ext4) to which several files and folders have been copied. The transfer of data to the drive took several minutes, and during this process, bookmarks from Chromium were exported to the drive. After some time, it was discovered that some files are empty and have a size of 0 bytes, however, all folders containing "empty" files have the size that they should have had with intact files.
Is it possible to recover these files? Thank you!

Answer 1

Safe extraction (unmounting) was invented for wimps.
It is highly likely that the files have not yet been physically written to the disk. the record is cached. Those. before pulling out the flash drive, it was necessary to give the sync command or unmount the disk (when unmounting, sync also occurs). You can try to restore the files, of course, but I think that the chances are quite small.

Answer 2

fsck
e2fsck