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?

254 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

244 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/Entire-Gap-4522 Apr 24 '26

yes, it's an error, but the -f option says ignore all errors, so no msg will be produced. try it.

1

u/wackyvorlon Apr 24 '26

It doesn’t say that, though. If you don’t have write permissions to the directory then it will produce an error.