Today had some important markdown file that accidentally deleted on my SSD and had to go over the recovery of it.

All I did was this:

run sudo systemctl status fstrim.timer to check how often TRIM runs on my system (apparently it runs weekly and the next scheduled run was in 3 days)

run sudo pacman -S testdisk

run sudo photorec

choose the correct partition where the files were deleted

choose filesystem type (ext4)

choose a destination folder where to save recovered files

start recovery

10-15 minutes and it’s done.

open nvim in parent folder and grep for content in the file that I remember adding today

That’s it - the whole process was so fast. No googling through 10 different sites with their shitty flashy UIs promising “free recovery,” wondering whether this is even trustworthy to install on your machine, dealing with installers that’ll sneak in annoying software if you click too fast, only to have them ask for payment later. No navigating complex GUIs either.

I was so thankful for this I actually donated to the maintainers of the software. Software done right.

  • TachyonTele@piefed.socialEnglish
    31·
    5 days ago

    Question. Where do you learn commands? There’s no way you thought “let’s try sudo” out of no where.

    Sincerely,
    New Linux User

    Edit: Great responses everyone, thank you!

    • puttputt@beehaw.org
      26·
      5 days ago

      In another comment, OP said they checked the arch wiki, specifically https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/File_recovery. The arch wiki is a great resource; most of the information is not arch-specific and is useful for linux in general.

      Regarding “let’s try sudo”: you should get familiar with sudo because it’s one of the most important linux commands. It runs a command with elevated privileges (it originally stood for “super-user do”). That means sudo isn’t actually the important part of the commands; it just means that the following commands (pacman and photorec) need elevated privileges. pacman deals with systemwide package management and photorec needs access to the raw storage device objects in order to recover files.

      • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
        15·
        5 days ago

        Acktually sudo is there to run a command as another user, it does not need to be “superuser” (also known as rot). “superuser” is just the default. To be honest, I never used the option to run as another user, because my computers are single user only. There are so many more options. One should look into man sudo to see whats possible, its incredible!

        However, there are alternatives to sudo, such as doas from OpenBSD ported over and run0 from the evil SystemD. They find sudo to be complicated and bloated.

        Also quick tip: sudoedit (same as sudo -e or sudo --edit) instead sudo vim to edit your files with elevated privileges while using your personal configuration. If you want do that, that’s up to you. I want to use my Vim configuration while editing files within sudo right.

        • towerful@programming.dev
          4·
          4 days ago

          Yeh, I think it’s actually “switch user do”.
          Like “su” is “switch user”.

          The default being root is handy.

          • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
            3·
            4 days ago

            Yes and no. The original design of sudo stands for super user do, and could only run with super user privileges. The run as other users feature was added later, and then they renamed it to substitute user do. I even looked up to get that fact right, and always forget its “substitute” and not “switch”, but I also think of sudo as switch user do.^^

    • Badabinski@kbin.earth
      2·
      3 days ago

      If you’d like to learn more about Bash itself, this is an amazing resource: https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide

      Probably the ONLY place on the internet that will teach you to write safe shell scripts. Most shit on StackOverflow (and consequently, most shell generated by LLMs) is dangerous garbage.

    • nope@jlai.lu
      8·
      4 days ago

      A very nice terminal-based cheatsheet is named tldr (or tealdeer).
      It gives you a very short explanation of what a program does, and then lists common uses of that program and explains them

    • balsoft@lemmy.ml
      9·
      5 days ago

      I’ll be real with you. What you need to do is, whenever faced with a task that sounds like it needs CLI, go search stackoverflow for that task. It probably has something slightly relevant to what you need, you take the commands from that answer and read their manuals.

      • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
        8·
        5 days ago

        At least do not ask the Ai for sudo stuff. While Stack Overflow nowadays also includes Ai answers, at least these are online monitored and checked by humans.

    • AllHailTheSheep@sh.itjust.works
      8·
      5 days ago

      there are lots of cheatsheets out there but the best way to learn commands is practice. different people will use different commands, so you may not need to spend time learning ffmpeg syntax whereas others find it invaluable. Google is your friend while learning. if you have a Linux question, chances are someone else has had the same question and posted about it online. as far as basics go, spend some time learning about grep and find, they are probably the two most valuable basic commands imo outside of the common ls/mkdir/etc.

      as for sudo, it’s just “superuser do” so it’s essentially the same as hitting run as admin in windows. lots of times if you try to run a command without sudo that needs it, you’ll get a permission error which reminds you to run as superuser. it eventually becomes second nature to say “ah, this command needs direct access to a hardware device or system files” which means it’ll need to be run with sudo.

    • bitwolf@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      It takes some time to understand the manpage format but it’s worth the time because they’re always available.

      When I first started, I used the website explainshell to help my get an idea of how the most common commands worked.

      This has the benefit of referencing the man pages directly so you can better learn how to interpret them.

    • z3rOR0ne@lemmy.ml
      4·
      4 days ago

      Becoming familiar with the essentials, grep, awk, sed is a good start. Manual pages can of course be accessed using man followed by the command/program you want to know more about. Understanding operators like |, >, >>, etc. can help as well. And reading the entirety of man bash is a good way to dive in further.

    • PastafARRian@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      13·
      4 days ago

      AI is great for learning Linux imo, e.g. ask “why did my command say Permission Denied?”. If you object to ChatGPT there are local AI engines too