Hi, welcome back Pegleg…
Perhaps covering your tracks was not the best idea… You should perhaps pay attention to the news feeds whenever you backup (assuming you’ve been here longer than 2 years).
Snapshots
This is perhaps my favourite solution, as it avoids having to reveal stupid mistakes in the forum (and hopeully I’ll remember not to make them again).
Since using Linux Mint, I always made sure I had some kind of snapshot (using Timeshift mostly) to roll back and correct stupid mistakes (and I’ve made plenty of those).
I’m guessing you have no snapshots.
Detective work:
You will need to be very specific - what update, Stable, Testing, or Unstable. This might help someone sort out what kind of pacnew files they remember cropping up recently.
You should also read (you should have read before) the Update Thread:
Especially this part:
If you’ve loaded up any of those pacnew files, there might be some history in your ‘recent files’ or in your text editor’s history.
Search the Forum
Here’s one: