Where is the deleted items' folder?

[T J Tulley]

[Using LinuxMint-9 with Windows-7 on a laptop with Pentium dual-core 2.2 GHz cpu, 4 GB RAM, 500GB hdd]

I've had a strange data loss - yesterday I created several text files in html code using Gedit, repeatedly saving them, and also opening them in Firefox and Opera.

The system successfully hibernated overnight, and I didn't access those files earlier today but during the day the battery became discharged: the machine automatically hibernates when this happens but this time a reboot was required.

Now the folder containing those files has disappeared, including one copied from a cd and another containing edited extracts from that. All of these were open in compiz workspaces, but they had also been saved to a folder in My Documents.
In addition, in Firefox, History for the past 7 days has completely disappeared. History items are present from 16:ll today (when I re-booted), and before 18/05/10-22:17. This hasn't happened to Opera (installed 22/5/10) nor to Thunderbird, where my e-mail records are complete. (But viewings of the lost files in Opera have disappeared from its history). The complete Firefox History was present this morning before today's hibernation.

I have a faint hope that the missing folder might be in the Deleted items folder - I have sometimes seen an invitation to empty that before shutting down. Can I access it? It doesn't appear in the File Browser directory, but must be somewhere in the hard drive.

I shall be most grateful for advice - those files represent a lot of work!

Yours hopefully, -

Theo Tulley.

[Biker]

Try:

/home/%yourlogin/.local/share/Trash

[T J Tulley]

Thanks Biker - Nothing there - last deletion date 20/5/10.
So where can that folder be? The files also don't show in Recent files in Gedit.
But thanks to your advice, I now know where Tomboy lives, for backup purposes.

Yours hopefully, -

Theo Tulley.

[Biker]

The "Deleted Items Folder" (aka Trash) is where I specified. You should see a couple of directories under that, one of them for deleted files. Bear in mind, if a file is deleted using the "rm" command at terminal, they don't end up in Trash, unless rm has been scripted to be more like the mv (move) command.

[T J Tulley]

Thanks - I meant, nothing in the Trash/files folder. In fact, it contains one item, My Documents/desktop.ini. The adjacent Info. file contains the report of its deletion date & time - last Thursday.

Of course I didn't delete or rm the missing folder; I had printed one of the files from its Firefox presentation (a web page) and this shows most of the path in its header. (Too long for R section of header).

I've tried $ locate for some of the remembered file names - no luck; I shall have to start again, having learned a bit about html composition.

Yours sincerely, -

Theo Tulley.

[pluraldave]

Each partition has a folder called "lost+found". Find this for the partition that the files should have been saved on and see if they have been moved there.

[T J Tulley]

Thanks pluraldave:

It's an NTFS partition - no lost+found.

There is an alternative path to My Documents via a link from Desktop, so I tried to open my /lost+found. There is a padlock on it so I guess I need to be root to view its contents with $ ls -a.

Having discovered that lost_found is directly in / (in previous releases it was in /home) I tried: $ sudo cd lost+found, with the surprising second response:
theo@TJTLap3 / $ cd /lost+found
bash: cd: /lost+found: Permission denied
theo@TJTLap3 / $ sudo cd /lost+found
sudo: cd: command not found

So I made 2 more attempts:
theo@TJTLap3 / $ /lost+found ls-a
bash: /lost+found: is a directory
theo@TJTLap3 / $ sudo /lost+found ls -a
sudo: /lost+found: command not found

Any more ideas?

With many thanks,
Yours sincerely, -
Theo Tulley.

[Biker]

So I made 2 more attempts:
theo@TJTLap3 / $ /lost+found ls-a
bash: /lost+found: is a directory
theo@TJTLap3 / $ sudo /lost+found ls -a
sudo: /lost+found: command not found

By typing sudo /lost+found, you are essentially stating that /lost+found is a command that is found in root. However, I don't know why the previous change directory command would not work unless there was a typo somewhere in the string.

[pluraldave]

You need to do it in two steps:

Code: Select all

sudo su
cd /lost+found

or graphically

Code: Select all

gksu nautilus /lost+found

I don't know what affect the partition being ntfs might have had. You may want to consider trying to use testdisk/photorec to recover the missing files.

[T J Tulley]

Thanks again pluraldave.

sudo su was a useful trick and following cd /lost+found, ls -a revealed the contents as just the standard . .. - nothing else.

I entered testdisk/photorec in Wikipedia and evidently it's powerful but I can't face learning how to use it for a single folder: I'm half way to reconstructing the data (7 web pages) and going away for most of a fortnight on Friday. This is voluntary work - not business - and I'm very much an amateur.

Just why a single folder should disappear remains a mystery - it had no unique features that I can discern to make it do so without others similarly open in compiz workspaces doing the same. The battery went flat while hibernating (using no energy?) - some re-charge required before full re-boot possible - then folder missing!
With many thanks,

Yours sincerely, -

Theo Tulley.

[conslie]

You might want to try the 'locate' command from the terminal.

See http://www.linfo.org/locate.html

Edit to add: I once experienced something similar, but it was when I used Remastersys when something broke to revert to a saved prior state, so that made sense. Lost a week or so of email and Firefox history and such. Leads me to ask if you have more than one installation of Mint and, if so, is there a chance you rebooted into a different one than you were using when you did your HTML work?

[mick55]

Hi Theo

Double click the Computer icon on the desktop. Trash should be in the left hand pane.

Also off the main Menu under "Places" browse to "Recent Documents" and see if the
ones you were working on are listed.

You might wish to give Ubuntu Tweak a spin. It allows various tweaks you might find useful.

http://ubuntu-tweak.com/

It works perfectly on Mint and is extremely useful.

cheers
mick