If you could do that, that would make things like
installing stuff
much easier
Pick the newest one - less updates to run before you can install your recovery tool.
Even better would be to create a bit by bit copy - an image - of your /home partition
to some other drive dd is the utility to do that
you would have preserved the current state - and can experiment recovering from it
instead of having just one shot with the real data on your drive.
The /home directory is over 650 gig. Its a helluva lot of work for one directory.
Geez you’d think Linux would have an undelete utility that is fairly straightforward.
I’ve used recovery tools in Windows for deleted files before plenty of times. Weird to hear myself saying Windows can do something Linux can’t. But man it is a lot of hassle
I’m surprised after all these years somebody hasn’t just included an undelete command in stock Unix/Linux as a standard in every OS. Crimeny people do delete things.
It may even be equally as easy as that on Windows.
Who knows? I don’t.
But first you need to have that tool available.
That means installing it.
And that is easier done with a recent iso which you don’t need to update much before you can install that tool.
… what is the data worth to you?
and:
it is not just the /home directory you need an image of - if /home is not on it’s own partition
If you have everything on one partition - you can only pull an image of the whole drive …
you need the filesystem structure that /home resides in - not just the directory
to do what you want to do
I think I found one.
Like Rodney Dangerfield said. “I say ‘Hi, heaviness!’ and the heaviness looks back at me, ‘Today you’re gonna get it good. You’ll be drinking early today…”
There’s some confusion that needs to be cleared up, without getting too technical.
Data recovery is done against the actual “block device”, such as a partition. The “mount path” is not relevant. When you boot into a live USB, the “/home/” path you see is for the live (in RAM) temporary filesystem. It has nothing to do with the actual block device you are concerned with (i.e, “sda7”).
You don’t need to use a Manjaro live USB. You can use any modern Linux distro or specialty appliance that either allows easy installation of the necessary tools, or even includes them by default. (See the options mentioned earlier in this thread.) You can just as easily use the latest Ubuntu live ISO, and then install (in the live session) ext4magic using the APT package manager.
It’s highly recommended, but not “required”, to make an image of your drive to store on a spare external drive, regardless of the original drive’s health. The point of doing this critical step is to create a clone of the drive (or partition) as it existed in that moment in time, so that you can apply recovery tools against this read-only image file as much as you want, at your own leisure. Maybe because you want to deal with it later. Or maybe in case you make an accident while attempting data recovery on the physical drive itself. Or maybe because you come across superior data recovery methods some time in the future, and you still have this image file to work with.
Perhaps I missed it, but you still haven’t answered if this is an SSD or HDD?
What operating systems have a standard “undelete” tool, aside from the Trash / Recycle Bin?
If you want a user-friendly GUI, there’s always this option, which you have to pay for:
I would recommend to step back for a moment, calm down, and plan what to do.
Read up on your options and plan what you want to try and what steps you need to do.
Getting too stressed and rushing into trying this and that without a plan won’t work well.
Well I didn’t exactly rush into it. More like spent a whole day on it lol.
I think its something worth knowing though. And I rescued most of the files last night.
Looks like testdisk is where its at! If you can get it loaded, it works just as good as anything I’ve ever used on the Windows side.
So, my vote for restoring deleted files in Manjaro:
Get the latest iso, create a brand new bootable USB instance of Manjaro. Boot off the USB with F12.
I used Cinnamon_2137. That’s pretty important. You can spend hours dealing with old bugs that may already have been fixed.
Make sure your net connections are working!
Then use testdisk:
$sudo pacman -Sy testdisk
$sudo testdisk (be sure you have rights to actually create the log file)
Be sure and choose Advanced and go down to the corrrect Linux filesystem and LIST.
Don’t make my mistake and create an image file, which was the default. It does NOT need an image file to work, though the software doesn’t really make that clear.
Why? Because its possible the image file could overwrite the deleted files!
And it can take forever to do. Of course, I can see the wisdom of doing this
later. Amazingly, I still was able to recover at least most of them.
Its a pretty cool feature I’m sure I’ll delete something again. I could have lived without the files but something tells me I better know how to do this! haha
As far as Rodney I’m part Irish so I would have drank early also if it was a good day lol… (just kidding)
I’m going to mark this as the Solution because its all here, though you can all take credit for steering me in the right direction. thanks folks.
Get the latest iso, create a brand new bootable USB instance of Manjaro.
is unnecessary, well unnecessarily specific…
As @ winnie pointed out, any Linux Distro would have worked, indeed, using an Ubuntu based distro, might have made the job much easier, given the troubles you obviously had getting the software you needed working, due to the specific needs of Manjaro.
