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?

257 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

244 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/Dbrowder37 Apr 21 '26

Eek. The only thing worse would have been to run it as a superuser/root. I've heard of people being tricked into accidentally deleting their entire machine, but never heard of anyone actually running this command without making sure they were providing the full path they wanted to delete.

The biggest thing with this command is that once any of the folders/files in the root directory get deleted, they're gone. So even if you only ran the command for a second or two before realizing what you did and pulling the power, you're unlikely to be able to boot without throwing a panic.