[KLUG Members] help for longtime (but novice) user who finally managed to misuse rm...?

[Bruce Smith]

> > My home (user) directory--and logged in as a regular user.  So the  
> > good news is, the system shouldn't be disturbed.  The bad news is,  
> > the deleted files are of actual importance to me personally!
> 
> This is why I have AT LEAST 2 copies of everything, sometimes 3, and

Yup.

> always preach the importance of backups.

I tell people about the importance of backups, but I've given up
preaching.  Some people just have to learn the hard way.   :-)

And I wasn't going to preach this time.  If he has a backup, then he's
all set.  If he doesn't, he just learned the hard way, and preaching
after the fact won't do any good.

> have any new files been written to the drive since the other files  
> were deleted?
> 
> If so, the space the files occupied may have already been partially  
> overwritten.

If I understood his previous message, the home directory (that was
partially removed by mistake) is part of his root partition.  So, even
if it was possible to recover deleted files from a journalized
filesystem (which I don't think it is), he's screwed anyway since
writing is constantly occurring on root (log files, ...).

Hence my previous email where I stated to start focusing on recovering
from backups.

 - BS