I have backup but...

I intended to use the command to reset Xsane to its default settings, but put in an extra space and wrote .

This seems to have removed all the files and settings in /home. I now boot into openSUSE 42.1 with everything as if I had just installed 42.1.

I haven’t written to my HDD and can clone all of it or the /home partition with dd, but I don't know if I can then restore /home with something like extundelete or should try to recover files with TestDisk or PhotoRec. /home is on its own ext4 logical partition.

Any advice will be received with all wishes of Karma for the sender.

I'm sorry to hear that.

When you say that you have "backup", what does that mean? Do you have a backup of your entire home folder or partition somewhere? How old is that backup?

Backup...

I have copies of the files that were stored in the various folders in /home on an external HDD, but not a backup such as with the program Back in Time. It is inconvenient but not fatal that my bookmarks and the settings for /home are not at hand.

most important thing: shut down the machine IMMEDIATELY and recover the data from the outside, i.e. booting from a live usb stick.

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Unfortunately, Linux did exactly what you told it to do. I hate it when it does that!

Certainly, do not write anything to the harddrive (intentionally - there's lots of writing that is beyond your control). And shut it down (cleanly) as soon as possible. Boot from a LiveCD - my preference is "SysRescueCD". Mount the harddrive you are recovering from as read-only. After that, try the "photorec" command. Make sure anything recovered by photorec is written to a different device (not the harddrive you are trying to recover from - if you have mounted it read-only as I mentioned, you would be protected already).

If photorec doesn't save you, there's not much left, in the "easy" department, except going to your backups and recovering as much from there as possible. There are other file recovery things you could try, but they get involved and complicated, and probably aren't worth it in your case, since you have backups you can fall back to instead.

well NEXT time you will READ what you typed before hitting <enter> !!!