Recovery deleted ibdata1

Recently I had a case when a customer deleted the InnoDB main table space – ibdata1 – and redo logs – ib_logfile*.

MySQL keeps InnoDB files open all the time. The following recovery technique is based on this fact and it allowed to salvage the database.

Actually, the files were deleted long time ago – 6 months or so. As long as file is open physically it still exits in the file system and reachable to processes which have opened it.