View Full Version : [ubuntu] Deleted my home directory. How to recover?
Jimmy9pints
December 30th, 2008, 04:06 PM
Hi, I was having a couple of glitches with Ubuntu, and since my home folder was mounted on a separate partition I thought the quickest way to sort it out was to reinstall.
Everything went smoothly, except because I changed my username from "james" to "jam", my Documents, Pictures etc. were not where they should be. Instead there were two folders in the /home directory, named james and jam.
I thought the solution was simple, so I ran
sudo mv james jam
Which promptly removed my folder named james, but the jam was still empty. DAM! I don't know what happened!
Any help appreciated.
taurus
December 30th, 2008, 04:41 PM
Are you in a recovery mode or from the LiveCD?
Can you post the outputs of these commands?
ls -la /home
tail -5 /etc/passwd
tail -5 /etc/group
stderr
December 30th, 2008, 04:44 PM
By executing that command, you should have ended up with:
/home/jam
/home/jam/james
with all the files that were in /home/james now in /home/jam/james. I can't see how it would have removed any files... :|
Jimmy9pints
December 30th, 2008, 05:16 PM
By executing that command, you should have ended up with:
/home/jam
/home/jam/james
with all the files that were in /home/james now in /home/jam/james. I can't see how it would have removed any files... :|
Actually, yes you're totally right. I still haven't got to grips with the command line after 10months!
What should I do now?
stderr
December 30th, 2008, 10:27 PM
Well, if you just want all the files that were in 'james' to move to 'jam', and your setup is now like this:
/home/jam/james
I'd use
mv -r /home/jam/james/* /home/jam
This will recursively (also moving all subdirectories) move all the files & dirs in james to jam. Then you can just check there's nothing left in james, then remove that directory.
ls /home/jam/james
^^ That should now be empty
du --max-depth=0 -h /home/jam/james
^^ That should report ~4KB, depending on your block size settings (it should be reporting the size of 1 folder).
du --max-depth=0 -h /home/jam
^^ That should report a much larger size
So, you can remove the empty 'james' dir with
rmdir /home/jam/james
and you should be done.
Jimmy9pints
December 31st, 2008, 01:36 PM
Thank you kindly!
stderr
December 31st, 2008, 07:52 PM
You're welcome :)
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