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Thread: All Desktop Folders and Files Disappeared

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Oct 2021
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    All Desktop Folders and Files Disappeared

    Today I had Ubuntu up for several hours. I clicked on a file on my desktop and it would not open. I went to a command prompt and couldn’t access the Desktop directory. I rebooted and when I logged in the desktop was empty. Anyone know what may have happened and if it is possible to recover the files?

    In syslog I don’t see any corruption errors although I don’t really know what to search for. (used grep -i corrupt and got nothing so grepped for file and didn’t find anything obvious. I did find this

    Oct 10 18:02:45 Sol gnome-session[1763]: gnome-session-binary[1763]: WARNING: Could not parse desktop file gsettings-data-convert.desktop or it references a not found TryExec binary

    And several several could not parse desktop file errors Any help would be greatly appreciated. This is a Ubuntu 18.04.6 system. Thank you.



    Dave
    Last edited by dh100; October 11th, 2021 at 03:39 AM.

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Oct 2021
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    Re: All Desktop Folders and Files Disappeared

    It looks like what happened is that all the folders and files that were in the Desktop directory got moved to snap/Desktop.

    Sorry to have to ask this but why would that have happened? What should I do? Just move all the files and folders back to the Desktop directory?

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Oct 2017
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    /dev/sdx
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    Hidden!
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    Ubuntu

    Re: All Desktop Folders and Files Disappeared

    Quote Originally Posted by dh100 View Post
    command prompt
    Linux doesn't have any command prompt here we only have terminal here. Linux is not microsoft windows
    Quote Originally Posted by dh100 View Post
    couldn’t access the Desktop directory.
    How did you access the desktop directry can you elaborate more on this?
    Quote Originally Posted by dh100 View Post
    In syslog I don’t see any corruption errors although I don’t really know what to search for. (used grep -i corrupt and got nothing so grepped for file and didn’t find anything obvious. I did find this
    Oct 10 18:02:45 Sol gnome-session[1763]: gnome-session-binary[1763]:
    can you paste all the current system logs of your system in Ubuntu paste bin and give us the link here in thread?
    Quote Originally Posted by dh100 View Post
    WARNING: Could not parse desktop file gsettings-data-convert.desktop or it references a not found TryExec binary
    This could be a gnome bug from your system.
    corn ubuntuforums community.
    Open Source platform where the real world of human is here. Click here for Solve thread

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Nov 2007
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    London, England
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    Re: All Desktop Folders and Files Disappeared

    ~/snap does not normally contain a Desktop directory, so I am guessing that ~/Desktop somehow got moved. I would just move it back again. This command should do it:
    Code:
    mv ~/snap/Desktop ~/
    Note that ~ is short for your home directory, whatever that is called.

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Apr 2007
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    3,111
    Distro
    Ubuntu

    Re: All Desktop Folders and Files Disappeared

    Quote Originally Posted by The Cog View Post
    ~/snap does not normally contain a Desktop directory, so I am guessing that ~/Desktop somehow got moved. I would just move it back again. This command should do it:
    Code:
    mv ~/snap/Desktop ~/
    Note that ~ is short for your home directory, whatever that is called.
    Here, I would suggest doing this with the graphical file manager. That will preserve the "special" status of the Desktop folder.

    If in the mean time, you moved already using the terminal, you can manually edit "~/.config/user-dirs.dirs" and restore the line for the desktop folder to read:
    Code:
    XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Desktop"

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