So I deleted something very important accidentally almost 12 hours ago and I finally made progress. After all the files said they were extracted the folder was empty.

This is the video Im using as a tutorial.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raa9...utu.be&t=1m33s

But I am on Ubuntu 13.10

I am not able to complete the first step using foremost

starting from $
He begins as #

first command is

And I am unable to do that.

What is the deal?

I tried switching to sudo -i

and that gives me an error I cannot even cd Desktop at all

That video was made using Kali which has root as the default user (!) -- in your system, root probably does not have a "Desktop" folder at all.

Instead, just use your normal user's home directory:
Proceed from there using `sudo` when elevated privileges are required.

I did do exactly that and the folder shows up on the desktop with a lock on it so I cannot see any files inside of it?

Try this:
Replace <user name> with your user name & <name of folder> with the the name of the folder.

This is what the command looks like

So Im not sure where you mean to place [chown] and [uid]?

I haven't watched the whole video so I have no clue what you're talking about.

The command I gave above will change the ownership of the file in ~/Desktop to your user so that you can access the contents and it should be run independently.

If your user name is "cocolate", use this:
(I forgot the `-R` flag originally)

1 members found this post helpful.

Is not a valid path, use /home/your_username/Desktop/recover or ~/Desktop/recover. You can use the chown command as posted to change ownership from root to your username. This will remove the "lock".

I assume that you inadvertently deleted a file on your Android device and now attempting to recover it. It would of helped us provide better answers if you had posted your actual problem. One suggestion would be to make a copy of your SD card as an image to keep from accidentally overwriting anything.

Is this a phone or tablet?

Im on Ubuntu 13.10 Alcatel One Touch Fierce 2 (Thats Android 4.2.x phone)


That was a very helpful suggestion to copy my SD card image. Im recopying the data with the pathname /home/uid/Desktop/recover it is showing the same results so I will now see if I can just chown it once finished and post back with results.

I was thinking wouldnt ddrescue be a more viable option for disk recovery from a USB on Linux if this doesnt go through? Thanks for your response.

Yes all of those things worked.

I would have been done in 5 min had I known:

Switch from MTP to SD card

chown uid

Now ubuntu wont play .mov

18 hours later

With ddrescue you can create an image of the disk. foremost, testdisk or testdisk can be run on the mounted image versus the disk.

Hopefully the deleted file is on the memory card versus the phone's internal memory.

I suspect since where I record videos are saved on the sd card theyd be recovered from there as well do you have any additional input?

If the data is on the internal memory Im completely screwed with Ubuntu I'll just have to create a Windozer disc or possibly see if ddrescue is the solution.