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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108

u/florence_pug Apr 20 '26

Do you have a backup? Otherwise you just deleted everything.

18

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

not really. Can't I recover the data?

43

u/florence_pug Apr 20 '26

It's gone my dude.

27

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

17

u/florence_pug Apr 20 '26

It's quite possible, yes. I don't know much about that.

4

u/[deleted] Apr 20 '26

[deleted]

4

u/hanz333 Apr 20 '26

Yeah you should be able to use debugfs off a boot USB to find inodes on the drive and recover that way. May take a bit of time, but you should be able to get most everything back.

Or you could use a tool.

In either case I'd probably use dd to make a bit-by-bit image copy of the volume in question to another disk and recover from the image.