Score:0

Home Directory Deletion

ba flag

For some reason I had the remnants of an old encrypted drive in my home directory from a previous distro that I had copied over long ago. Basically my home directory only contained the encrypted directory ".ecrpytfs/" and my actual user directory "username/". I deleted the encrypted folder with "sudo rm -r .ecryptfs" and now all the contents of home directory are gone.

Does anybody know why deleting this would delete my entire home directory and if there's any way to recover the files in "/username"?

user535733 avatar
cn flag
"*Does anybody know why deleting this would delete my entire home directory*" It's quite possible you made an unfortunate typo or other human mistake.
user535733 avatar
cn flag
"*if there's any way to recover the files in "/username"?*" Maybe. Stop using the drive so your data is not overwritten, and then look up how to use Photorec and Testdisk. In the future, it's a better idea to have backups.
Xen2050 avatar
us flag
Are you certain the .ecryptfs directory didn't actually contain your real home, and you weren't using an encrypted home? ecryptfs normally keeps all the real files in .ecryptfs, and the "username" is only an empty mount point. PS. `extundelete` might be an option, if you had an ext... filesystem, but testdisk is pretty intuitive, and has _terminal-graphics_
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