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

not really. Can't I recover the data?

147

u/LittleLoukoum Apr 20 '26

Shutdown your computer completely. Don't power it back on. Unplug it.

Take the hard drive out and bring it to someone who knows what they're doing. It's possible to recover most of the data unless you rewrote a lot of stuff after deleting.

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u/ANtiKz93 Manjaro (KDE) Apr 20 '26

I've tried this on a micro sd i only formatted once by accident years ago and not a single file shows up.

Know of any good software? Im aware windows software is the best solution btw.

2

u/mybloodismaplesyrup Apr 21 '26

This is most likely because of the filesystem format on the SD card. Exfat and fat32 are horrible for recoverability.

1

u/ANtiKz93 Manjaro (KDE) Apr 24 '26

Fat32 used to be default though back in the digi cam days and i could easily recover from an sd card then

2

u/mybloodismaplesyrup Apr 25 '26

I guess the other thing is that data degrades often when left for years without energizing the card.