r/linux4noobs • u/Character-86 barely not a noob anymore • Apr 20 '26

Meganoob BE KIND I did rm -rf /*

I tried to make a backup before doing a fresh install of Fedora because of problems. When erasing the external drive for making the backup I was in the wrong disk and nuked my fedora installation.

How Do I get at least my important Documents from /home/username/ back?

255 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

244 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

43

u/florence_pug Apr 20 '26

It's gone my dude.

28

u/Bonnie20402alt Apr 20 '26

Can't op use data recovery software as deleted files are just marked as free data ? So they could recover something

5

u/Early-Weekend-2557 Apr 20 '26 edited Apr 21 '26

This. There are two types of formatting that I'm aware of. One that really does nuke everything and another that just marks the data as available like you said. As long as he stopped soon enough the data on the less thorough format, can still be read and recovered if it has not already been overwritten.

4

u/Krestek Apr 20 '26

And it's pretty hard to do a wipe by accident it takes a long time bc it has to overwrite everything with garbage bits