Hi, I downloaded 30 GB of files to my Xubuntu laptop, but looked through a few hours ago, but could not find any of them, not in downloads or documents...

What else can I do?

Hi,

How did you download them? Manually using wget? FTP, torrent, ...? Directly from a website in a browser? You need to provide more information on what you were doing. Depending on what program you used, they might be in the directory where you were when you executed the command.

Kind regards,

Eric

If you know the name of just one of the files just go to terminal and first do a "updatedb" this will of course update the database to allow them to be found.Updating the database will probably allow you to find them!

Next in terminal do a "locate filename" when you see the results you will know where they are.

Several programs tell you where the stuff is downloaded to when you click on download/save. You may try to download again and see if you can locate the place in this way.

Thanks, I downloaded the documents from an external hdd.

So, you didn't download them you copied them from another drive. This is usually done by pointing the wanted file at a specific target directory.
or by mounting the external drive and simply copy/pasting the file(s).
At which point the entire drive is available to you in Thunar in the /media/external directory.

You should be able to mount an external through Thunar by simply clicking on the external drive as shown in your right panel too which is usually quicker and will also put it in the /media directory.

How did YOU "download" these files?