How do I recover missing files on an ext3 hard drive?

When you brought the system back up was not a fsck run on it?  What was the result?

More newer distros use some kind of journaling file system, such as ext3.   Give us a bit more information and perhaps we can help you out.

Its an ext3 file system, running on Fedora 2. Another system we have is running on Redhat 9.1 - we've had the same symptoms on it too.

Running fsck.ext3 on it made no difference.

Is there some way we could use an alternate superblock? Would that possibly fix the problem?

As more clues, the directory contains about 1,000 .png files. The directory is called "data". We need to recover this directory, and the .png files contained in it.

Have you tried any of the undelete tools? They were developed for ext2 but ext3 is just ext2 with journalling support. Have a look at
http://e2undel.sourceforge.net/

Sorry, this wont work. From http://e2undel.sourceforge.net/how.html:

"The following applies only to ext2. Even ext3, despite its compatibility with ext2, behaves in one crucial point differently from ext2 (see below), so undeleting files on ext3 requires a completely different approach."

In addition, the e2undel page does not mention ext3 compatibility.

Thanks for this. We have implemented a backup policy.