this is bizarre...one of my students somehow managed to delete all user directories in /home on her slack14 laptop

/home still exists but all of her files and mine are gone...

I can still ssh into the machine
She doesn't have root access to the machine
She said she was doing ctrl-alt-del to lock her machine and her finger slipped and she did ctrl-alt-del-ins. She then reported the desktop dropped to a shell and she crashed the machine with the power button. On reboot, /home/user and /home/user2 were gone...

Never _ever_ seen this before
Speculations?

If the user switched of the machine "hard" using the power-button I would suspect this to be a filesystem problem, not some kind of the user deleting files she doesn't have access to.
Assuming that you have made a backup already, have you tried to fsck the filesystem /home is on?

1 members found this post helpful.

yeah everything was backed up to the webserver, but this was bizarre and fsck did fix a number of errors on the filesystem
vielen dank!

Was /home a mounted filesystem separate from / (root)?

Perhaps the filesystem simply wasn't mounted so all you see is just the /home mount point.

If you didn't build the system you may check /etc/fstab to see if /home had normally been a separately mounted filesystem.