Where are my files from Windows 11? (swg-empire.de)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de to c/techsupport@lemmy.world

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I migrated my wife's PC after a forceful Windows 11 update to Linux. I made a backup of her files by doing an rsync of almost the complete C: drive onto an external drive formatted with exFAT. This was a grave mistake.

After the Linux installation we noticed that several files were missing and older files were back. My current guess is that I was somehow copying from an old snapshot instead of the current state.

I rsynced everything except for the Windows folder. Does anyone know if there is any chance of getting our filea back? Amd what actually happened?

Edit: After several weeks I finally found the answer. There are two drives in the laptop. But Linux didn't see the NVME drive because it does not support "RST with Optane". As soon as I switched the SATA mode over to AHCI I could see the system drive with the lost files.

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[-] Shadow@lemmy.ca 6 points 2 months ago

Where were the files? An "older snapshot" doesn't really make sense.

Did you copy hidden folders? Usually c:\Users should have everything you want.

[-] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 1 points 2 months ago

The files were in the Documents folder and on the Desktop. The Documents folder is completely missing and the Desktop is very empty and contains links to already uninstalled programs. I also copied the Firefox profile from c:\Users\MyWifesName\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla. And it too looks like it's about a year or two old.

[-] Shadow@lemmy.ca 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Check inside the OneDrive folder.

Could you have copied the wrong disk or something? Did you do the copy in windows, or Linux?

Try using something like ncdu / qdirstat to see if you can find any large folders buried elsewhere on the disk.

[-] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 1 points 2 months ago

In Linux. I just did an rsync -avP /source /target.

The OneDrive folder is empty except for a desktop.ini file.

[-] samwwwblack@lemm.ee 4 points 2 months ago

You probably want to check your wife's Onedrive online with a web browser as by default Windows doesn't keep files locally in Documents/Desktop/Pictures etc.

[-] Shadow@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Yeah that rsync command should be fine. I suspect you somehow copied the wrong thing, or Windows is using a non standard users folder path for some reason.

You'll probably need to cross your fingers and just look through the disk. Try the tools I mentioned above to search by disk usage, or just do find with some known file names.

[-] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 1 points 2 months ago

Yeah, I was pretty confident in my method, which is why I didn't bother to check if the file view in Windows was the same as in Linux. I'm currently running ncdu but I'm not very confident. A find run for a known filename yielded nothing.

[-] JackbyDev@programming.dev 3 points 2 months ago

When I turned on OneDrive it moved my Documents and Desktop folder to ~/OneDrive/. It's definitely not a coincidence that those are the two directories missing for you. As everyone is saying, try checking their Microsoft account.