hi ,

I need some advice from you all regarding the following matter.

I had a important folder in my Desktop called "vas " (/root/Desktop/vas). However , accidentally vas folder removed due to scheduled job in crontab.

I used "rm -rf" command to delete log files inside the vas directory.Mistakenly ,entire vas folder deleted instead of log files.

How should I recover the vas folder again ? I don't have backup even

Thanks

There are some tools which are intended to be run to recover lost data. The guides to using them typically benefit best with the following recommendations applied:

1. Minimize any access to that disk as soon as you encounter a data loss
2. Un-Mount the disk or shutdown as soon as possible
3. Boot from somewhere else, such as a live USB distribution and not off of the disk where you lost data, do not re-mount it
4. Run the recovery utility off of the alternately booted distribution; against that not-mounted disk.
5. Note that whatever you use, likely will not recover all the data
6. Time and amount of system usage makes a big difference; which is to say that if you kept your system running and did things with it; such as attempted to run the cron job which would access or create data in that directory, then good chance a large chunk of your deleted data may have been corrupted. Or if you downloaded and saved information to disk, it is also possible that your deleted data may have been corrupted.

Here are three links and my experience with this. Actually very recent, I had an rm -rf situation recently occur as well.

extundelete - For use with ext3 and ext4 partitions. Personally I've never had an ext3 partition, but I do have ext4. This worked best for me, it was my first attempt, the results stunk actually, but my belief is that the results actually were never going to be ever better than mediocre.

Undelete files on Linux systems - After my first attempt and finding that I didn't get much data, I tried this option. I probably should hesitate to even recommend it because it did not work; really it "told" me where there were problems but there was little I could do beyond what had already been done. I feel the overview is helpful and it does highlight some good understanding of what partitions really are on your disk.

Recover Deleted Files in Linux - This was my final attempt and I feel that it actually would work pretty good; however (and it's a BIG however) I feel that it is highly specific to certain file types. Such as it will find .DOC, .DOCX, .XLS, .XLSX, or JPEG, GIF, MPEG, and so forth; pretty much a TON of the common files one has for documents, pictures, ... professional or personal "data". My big however was that I'm a coder, therefore I have Makefiles, C, CPP, H, and so forth. It found ZERO of those files. Also things like .LOG, or .TXT, pretty much any type of file that is non-standard in the view of the creators of that tool. It has customization to concentrate on particular file types, I tried to give it C, H, and so forth; no joy. The customization is limited to the file types which that application already knows about. So it was a great tool, but I really didn't need all the images from my former browsing cache.

i've had luck with photorec in the past.

Photorec is in my third link. I should point out that Foremost was the one I was referring too which limited the file types. Photorec does work and does not limit the file types; I agree with schneidz and would recommend you try that first.

next time do not use "rm -rf" without using extreme caution

and DO NOT !!!!!!
run the gui as root
that is a very BIG security BLUNDER

also DO NOT save things to the "desktop" folder

that is not a real folder but a decorative place for holding "*.desktop" launchers

another tip is to create an image of the volume with DD and run photorec on the image, rather than the original drive, and first and foremost, NEVER, EVER, E-V-E-R, try to recover data to the same volume from which you are recovering.