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  • Folders from user suddenly in trash

    From Hans@21:1/5 to All on Sun Jul 6 16:50:01 2025
    Hi folks,

    I have a freind and he ran into the problem, that almost all folders are suddenly in trash after reboot, including "Documents", "Desktop", "My Music" , "My Videos" and so on.

    He is swearing, he did nothing but reboot and I believe him.

    Did anyone of you heard of this behaviour? I am completely lost, what this could cause.

    In dolphin I set every "delete" and "move-to-trash" to be asked for.

    He is running KDE with two widgets on: Folder-View (one pointing to "Desktop", the other one pointing to "Documents").

    As I have no access to the computer at the moment, what can I do? What might cause this behaviour?

    This computer was well running for many years.

    Best

    Hans

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  • From Charles Curley@21:1/5 to Hans on Sun Jul 6 19:10:01 2025
    On Sun, 06 Jul 2025 16:41:47 +0200
    Hans <[email protected]> wrote:

    As I have no access to the computer at the moment, what can I do?
    What might cause this behaviour?

    This computer was well running for many years.

    That smacks of imminent hard drive failure.

    I hope he's got backups! If not, I'd shut the machine down now, order a replacement drive, and install new. Then use the old drive to copy data
    to the new one.

    You might look at it with gsmartcontrol. But even that could make
    things worse.

    Pr hope someone else has a less drastic suggestion.

    --
    Does anybody read signatures any more?

    https://charlescurley.com
    https://charlescurley.com/blog/

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  • From [email protected]@21:1/5 to Charles Curley on Sun Jul 6 19:40:01 2025
    On Sun, Jul 06, 2025 at 11:06:42AM -0600, Charles Curley wrote:
    On Sun, 06 Jul 2025 16:41:47 +0200
    Hans <[email protected]> wrote:

    As I have no access to the computer at the moment, what can I do?
    What might cause this behaviour?

    This computer was well running for many years.

    That smacks of imminent hard drive failure.

    That doesn't make sense to me.

    - if the files are gone... well, possibly
    - if they (or more precisely, some their fragments, with no
    names) appear in /.lost+found (after an fsck) quite probably

    But the regular trash folder? My first guess is "the user did
    that" (of course without noticing: "modern DEs" are complex enough
    to make such a scenario plausible). My second guess would be some
    bug in the desktop environment (or in some extension thereof).

    Cheers
    --
    t

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  • From Marco Moock@21:1/5 to All on Sun Jul 6 20:00:01 2025
    On 06.07.2025 19:10 Uhr Charles Curley wrote:

    That smacks of imminent hard drive failure.

    Run badblocks to test the entire disk.

    --
    kind regards
    Marco

    Send spam to [email protected]

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  • From Hans@21:1/5 to All on Sun Jul 6 20:00:01 2025
    But the regular trash folder? My first guess is "the user did
    that" (of course without noticing: "modern DEs" are complex enough
    to make such a scenario plausible). My second guess would be some
    bug in the desktop environment (or in some extension thereof).

    Cheers

    Yes, that is what I think, too. Although the user is over 70 years old, I do not believw, he did it. Especially as this was not the first time, it
    happened.

    More I believe, this happens due to some settings or some script in the background.

    All the files are not gone, all the files are in the trash (trash means: Trash folder on the desktop). I have disabled the possibility to delete files directly, all deleted files are moved into the trash. After recheck the user then can empty the trash (Windows-behaviour).

    Today I restored all his data (restored his complete ~home directory, which resides on a seperate partition (thus it is easy to backup and restore using clonezilla).

    Additionally I installed Deja-Dup, so he has backup if things happen again.

    My question to the forum aimed mainly, if someone in the past got this issue, too.

    In the web, most messages of disappeared folders were related to Windows, not linux.

    Best

    Hans

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  • From [email protected]@21:1/5 to Marco Moock on Sun Jul 6 20:40:01 2025
    On Sun, Jul 06, 2025 at 07:33:19PM +0200, Marco Moock wrote:
    On 06.07.2025 19:10 Uhr Charles Curley wrote:

    That smacks of imminent hard drive failure.

    Run badblocks to test the entire disk.

    Sorry, folks. This is the totally wrong direction.

    If anything, there might be file system inconsistencies (those may,
    of course, come from a bad block device). But then you should see
    the problems at boot, since file systems are checked before mount
    on a regular schedule.

    No, if some files end up *cleanly* in the trash folder (which is just
    a regular directory in the same file system), this is *not* a symptom
    for a bad file system (or, as you imply, a bad block device).

    Cheers
    --
    t

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  • From Chris Green@21:1/5 to Hans on Sun Jul 6 21:30:01 2025
    Hans <[email protected]> wrote:
    But the regular trash folder? My first guess is "the user did
    that" (of course without noticing: "modern DEs" are complex enough
    to make such a scenario plausible). My second guess would be some
    bug in the desktop environment (or in some extension thereof).

    Cheers

    Yes, that is what I think, too. Although the user is over 70 years old, I do not believw, he did it. Especially as this was not the first time, it happened.

    I have to say (and I'm well over 70) that the concept of a trash
    folder always strikes me as very silly.

    If I delete a file I want it deleted so that I actually recover the
    space it occupies.

    Taking over from the system's way of deleting files and instead moving
    them somewhere else is inherently risky, it doesn't get the same care
    as regards security as the system's basic utilities do.

    Make sure you have a good backup system and, preferably, some sort of incremental backup of important stuff. Don't expect the system to
    protect you from yourself.

    --
    Chris Green
    ยท

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  • From David Wright@21:1/5 to Hans on Mon Jul 7 06:00:01 2025
    On Sun 06 Jul 2025 at 19:51:01 (+0200), Hans wrote:
    But the regular trash folder? My first guess is "the user did
    that" (of course without noticing: "modern DEs" are complex enough
    to make such a scenario plausible). My second guess would be some
    bug in the desktop environment (or in some extension thereof).

    Yes, that is what I think, too. Although the user is over 70 years old, I do not believw, he did it. Especially as this was not the first time, it happened.

    More I believe, this happens due to some settings or some script in the background.

    All the files are not gone, all the files are in the trash (trash means: Trash
    folder on the desktop). I have disabled the possibility to delete files directly, all deleted files are moved into the trash. After recheck the user then can empty the trash (Windows-behaviour).

    Am I right in thinking that Trash folders typically keep a note of
    when items were placed there? Apart from analysing which folders were
    moved and which left behind, the timings of their arrival in the Trash
    could be helpful, particularly if a script is the cause (when the
    script runs might be discoverable).

    Today I restored all his data (restored his complete ~home directory, which resides on a seperate partition (thus it is easy to backup and restore using clonezilla).

    Why not move the folders back from Trash, so you don't lose any recent
    changes to the files that might not have made it yet into the backups?

    Additionally I installed Deja-Dup, so he has backup if things happen again.

    My question to the forum aimed mainly, if someone in the past got this issue, too.

    In the web, most messages of disappeared folders were related to Windows, not linux.

    Presumably you can lose those by including KDE, and perhaps Trash,
    among the search terms. Most of the hits I read seemed to be about
    whether the Trash folder had special properties in its behaviour
    (like its icon, and its right-click menu, for example).

    Cheers,
    David.

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  • From Hans@21:1/5 to All on Mon Jul 7 16:00:01 2025
    I think ~/.local/share/Trash/info/ contains a .trashinfo file for each trashed file (path and deletion Date).

    Yes, it does. But it shows only original path and deletion date/time. However, this might help, though.

    Hans

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