Lutris just deleted 200 GB worth of files

[WhatTheHell]

I installed a demo manually, using this tutorial:

Very Brief tutorial on manually installing a game in Lutris

Hi there, I noticed that a few people were looking for information on installing games manually in lutris. I threw this together in a few minutes and posted it on reddit, it is not exact and needs a bit of tweaking and cleaning up, but it does give a good idea on how to set up a bottle/prefix and install a game. Easy steps for installing any game in Lutris: Start lutris and then click on second icon from left at top of the window “Manage Runners”. Scroll down to wine and select “Manage Versio…

Picking the executable from my /home/me/Downloads directory to do the install, and then changing the executable to the prefix (/home/me/GameDemo/demo.exe) to play the demo. Worked fine, all was well. And I must say that it’s nice to have a simple method to install things manually, even if it involves the weird executable-changing workaround. I don’t understand why Lutris doesn’t make that easy.

I played the demo, then I deleted the demo (Remove from library / Remove all data) and it deleted my entire Downloads directory instead of deleting the prefix directory. 200 GB worth of random files that I’d collected over many years.

So my first question is: What the hell?

My second question is: What the FUCK?!

My third question is: is there any way to get those files back? I don’t know how to undelete something like that. I doubt that it’s even possible. I’m still kind of in shock here, I’m sort of tingling all over.

My fourth question is: What the fucking hell!?

[Medath]

Uh that sounds bad.

For recovering your files: Try not to write anything to the disk that contained the files. Your chances of successful recovery reduce with every write to the affected disk. Optimally you would boot a live Linux USB Stick that was created from another computer for the instructions described below.

My first try would be using testdisk to see if it finds the deleted files. Most distributions should have that tool in their repositories. If testdisk fails, you could try photorec (which will most likely come with the installation of testdisk). Photorec just scans the entire drive for patterns that look like files. Its disadvantage is that it only works for popular file types and it can’t recover the file names or directory structure, but it most likely will get something back.

If both of these approaches fail you could try if the free demo of r-studio is able to find your deleted files. In my experience it works a bit better than testdisk. Actually recovering them with this tool would cost money though.

[WhatTheHell]

All right. I got a lot of files using photorec, so that’s a partial success as far as that goes. Thanks for the suggestion. None of them have names, and… well, it’s a big project but I’m glad to have something at least.