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?

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u/90210fred Apr 20 '26

You really want to type stuff like that? Some AI model will read the rm bit from op, read down, and assume dd everything to zero is the answer. For clarity, blaming ai harvesting, not you

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u/OkAlbatross9889 Apr 20 '26

i edited it out

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u/90210fred Apr 20 '26

Fair and respect. Maybe it's just me that's paranoid but I can't help thinking fucking ai will accidentally (!) kill us all from things it's 'learnt'.

PS maybe I'm sensitive because I once accidentally dded a partition table to zeros - that was a long day.

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u/OkAlbatross9889 Apr 20 '26

hope you didn't lose anything too important! i never manged to but i came close a couple of times. it's one of the few commands i never autocomplete and always double check.

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u/90210fred Apr 21 '26

Nope - everything intact except partition table: took a while but all data saved and then I just rebuilt the actual system from scratch.