Recover a deleted var/www/html

A friend of mine, phoned me right now, telling me that the var/www/html folder of his server was deleted. No backup.
I think it was deleted through Webmin. I find it odd that it's possible to delete such a directory without a ton of warnings, through a panel.
I asked if it was hidden somehow, but he tells me that it just isn't inside var/www

I looked for more info, and found some, but too complicated.
http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/Ext2fs-Undeletion.html

Is there a way to recover it? I told him to look for hidden or backups files on the server, but he is not a linux expert. And neither am I. I know the basic stuff.

Sorry if I can't be more specific, but I live 300 miles away from him, so I cannot check the server myself.

 

As long as the files are deleted, it cannot be recovered in linux as far as I know. What I suggest is that he do 'updatedb' and search for the html files if he ever done a backup somewhere which he might have forget about it(no harm trying luck right?).

The next move is to plan his backup already, data loss are the most priceless goods to pay.

If he ever needs a quick script, I can always write a fast one

 

Hello!

Yes, nothing is better than a backup. Well, they didn't had one, so they lost that info...

 

Ouch, really really wish for your guys' sake I had read this thread before just now If you still haven't tampered with the server too much I'd be more than glad to help you out. The thing about magnetic storage is that it doesn't actually delete a file when you delete it, it just marks a little indicator on the drive saying that the data can be overwritten, and removes it from the file indexing. The computer will stop finding the data, but it's still there, so it's very easy to recover. The problem is as soon as you overwrite that data by installing new stuff or editing a bunch of things, it goes out the window

 

Yes, on Windows it's really easy to recover, but on Linux I didn't had a free program to give him. I found a commercial one, but he decided to not do anything, so it was his decision. By now the info was already rewrited many times, so it's better to forget about this.
Thank you for your help!