this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
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Can one recover from an accidental rm -rf of system directories by copying those files back in from a backup? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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Well I've joined the "accidentally trashing your system with rm -rf" club! Luckily I didn't delete my home directory with all the things I care about, but I did delete /boot and /usr, and maybe /var (long story, boils down to me trying to delete non-system directories named those but reflexively adding the slash in front when I should not have). I have backups of those as well, so what are my prospects of recovering from this by just copying them back in using a live USB? Only issue is they're stored in my server as belonging to the server user (I assume everything in those directories should belong to root and I can just use chown?) But I also don't know if they retain the same permissions when backed up.

Has anyone had any luck recovering a system in this way? I'm hoping not to have to reinstall everything because I had gotten pretty cozy with the current installation.

UPDATE: I finally had the time to sit down and try it, and, I was at least hoping to document some glitchy or unstable behaviour but it just didn't work at all. No matter what I tried I couldn't even get the UEFI to recognize the old system as bootable, so I cut my losses and just reinstalled. Gonna make sure I have btrfs snapshotting enabled this time, which I'm realizing I probably should have done in the first place.

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[–] drwho@beehaw.org 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Your chances are pretty good if you copy them back - ultimately, that's what the restoration function of backup software does.

As for ownership of the directories and files, that's a bit trickier and might involve some trial and error. root:root is a safe bet for most of it, but there is a lot of stuff in /var that is owned by system accounts.

What distro are you running? That'll help figure it out.

[–] HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I'm running Fedora 39 KDE. I think I'm going to see what the file metadata of my other Fedora systems look like and try to replicate that. Worst case I just reinstall. At this point I'm a little curious how the system will react.

[–] drwho@beehaw.org 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That's entirely valid. Good luck.

[–] HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Thank you! Regardless of the outcome I will update the main post with my findings in hopes giving anyone else in the same position some more info.