Hello -
I captured a Zoom recording to my computer yesterday evening. This afternoon I looked for it and didn't find it in the folder my Zoom app had been putting them in. I've recently changed my OS from Ubuntu 20.04 to Kubuntu 22.04, plus I ended up re-installing Zoom. I think this is why I couldn't find the file in the usual place because after some more searching, the file manager's, (Dolphin), search tool led me to the file -- in the Zoom-client folder which was in the Snap folder -- it was actually in a folder within the Zoom client folder.
I got the bright idea to "move," (not copy), the file from the folder it was in, to the Zoom folder within my "documents" folder, the default location where the recordings had been going before. After I made this move, then opened the Zoom folder in documents, I couldn't find the recording at all. All the previous Zoom recordings were still there but the one from last night that I "moved" wasn't to be seen. Using the Dolphin search tool hasn't found the file either.
I have the file name, (or most of it -- I had briefly played the file in VLC media player, so I copied the file name from it's list of recently played files), is there a command I could use from the terminal window to try to retrieve the file if it hasn't been overwritten?
Here's my computer's system information:

Operating System: Kubuntu 22.04
KDE Plasma Version: 5.24.6
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.92.0
Qt Version: 5.15.3
Kernel Version: 5.15.0-48-generic (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: X11
Processors: 8 × Intel® Core™ i7-4800MQ CPU @ 2.70GHz
Memory: 7.4 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: Quadro K2100M/PCIe/SSE2

Thanks.

If you played it in VLC, you should be able to open VLC, and click "Media->Open Recent Media", and see a list of files. Once you know the name (and providing it's in your home directory), type in "find ./ -iname <filename>", and it'll show you where it is. Or you could open the Zoom client, and see where it's set to save things.

Thank you but I think I'm past that stage. First I couldn't find the file because Zoom didn't put it in the folder Zoom used to use. But that was an older version of Zoom. I had installed a new version of Zoom, (which is what I used for last night's meeting that I recorded), so I did manage to find where the new version of Zoom put the recording and briefly played it in VLC.
My problem came when I tried to move the file from the folder the newer version of Zoom is using, to the folder the older version of Zoom used. I clicked "move" as a choice, (versus "copy"), and when I looked for the recording in the older folder, it wasn't there, nor is it in the newer folder I supposedly moved it from. It has somehow been deleted. So, I'm trying to retrieve a deleted file. As I said before I know the name, (or most of the name), because I copied the name from VLC.

Good but slightly embarrassing news. I found the missing file -- apparently copied into the wrong folder. At least it gives confidence that I did do the file moving operation right and the OS didn't just make my file disappear -- I just didn't notice that the folder was being moved to the wrong place.


Thanks anyway.

To go back to the original question, locate would have been a useful command in this situation. It's not as versatile as find, but also not as complex.

Glad it is solved , next time you might want to look in the system Temp folder( /tmp ) i find a lot of things in there.

How about a sane backup policy, I cannot lose files I had yesterday even if I accidentally delete them. Because daily rsnapshot backup runs every night.