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I was trying to set up a family member up with Linux as a windows replacement. I installed MX Linux xfce on their laptop with separate “/” and “/home” partitions.

Through a comedy of errors, the following occurred:

  • On day one, Timeshift was configured to take weekly snapshots of the system files AND their user home folder.
  • The initial timeshift snapshot was begun, and then cancelled when they discovered that home files aren’t the intended target, but they noticed growing snapshot files, indicating the cancelation wasn’t complete.
  • NCDU was used to remove the files in /home/timeshift
  • The family member’s only copies of three days of paid work in a writing program called Bibisco (Java app) disappeared after reboot

The system was rebooted twice before the cause was discovered and shutdown with minimal (5min) use.

I’ve never done any ext4 data recovery, but the tools in Kali seem geared toward common and known filetypes (pdf, jpg, etc).

Should I be looking to restore the timeshift files, or the writing documents (with .bibisco2 file extensions)?

Is this a lost cause?

Edit: Thank you everyone for your helpful comments. In the end, time was against us and the choice was made to reinstall. After I realized the document files are just json, I looked in three Kali carving apps and the photorec app, and there were no files to recover. The freah install now has eclone set up to push regular updates from the bibisco folder to the cloud. Lesson learned.

  • @mvirtsEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    No worries 😁 lol I’ve been kind of obsessing over this issue, reading timeshift’s code and stuff. Timeshift uses rsync under the hood to do file copying when not in btrfs mode, which uses the delete excluded option to keep excluded files out of snapshots. I was not able to determine if a cancelled snapshot would be rolled back with rsync going the other way, but it would be a major timeshift bug to delete excluded files on restore so I doubt that happened.

    Timeshift dos say that it has rsync create hard links for local snapshots on the same fs, so that could complicate matters. even though ncdu supports hard links and not double counting them, I tested deleting hard linked files and it only deletes the file entry from one folder even though it’s aware that the file is used in another folder in the tree.

    With that much free space you’re almost guaranteed that the files are still there, even after a rebuild. Idk if you want to get more in depth let me know