Ubuntu – How to recover or create deleted ‘Documents’ folder in Home folder

data-recoverydirectory

I accidentally deleted 'Documents' folder and all its contents in Home folder, is there any step by step way to recover or at least recreate an empty original 'Documents' folder again? I'm using ubuntu 12.04 by the way.

Best Answer

To create a new Documents folder

Open home folder > right click > new folder. Name it Documents

If the icon is incorrect then right click on the new Documents folder > properties. Click on the folder icon, this will bring up a select custom icon window.

Browse to File System > usr > share > icons > Humanity > places > 48 & select the 1st folder_documents.svg. This should restore the icon to your Downloads folder

Then gedit ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs or browse to file. You'll see this line - XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/"

edit it to this & save. Then log out/in

XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/Documents"

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Ubuntu – Recover deleted folder in encrypted home

You're right in your assumption that you need to unmount the ecryptfs-encrypted file system. ecryptfs works on top of an underlying file system whereas undeletion tools like extundelete operate on ext file systems like the one you probably have underneath your ecryptfs file system.

You don't need access to the unencrypted document files to undelete them. Instead you'll undelete the encrypted files in ~/.Private or wherever your ecryptfs file system is located (not mounted).

For the actual undeletion procedure refer to other answers like:

Ubuntu – The home directory content deleted

To return all to the defaults and recover your Desktop run the following single command in a Terminal window and then reboot:

xdg-user-dirs-update --set DESKTOP "$HOME/Desktop" && \
xdg-user-dirs-update --set DOWNLOAD "$HOME/Downloads" && \
xdg-user-dirs-update --set TEMPLATES "$HOME/Templates" && \
xdg-user-dirs-update --set PUBLICSHARE "$HOME/Public" && \
xdg-user-dirs-update --set DOCUMENTS "$HOME/Documents" && \
xdg-user-dirs-update --set MUSIC "$HOME/Music" && \
xdg-user-dirs-update --set PICTURES "$HOME/Pictures" && \
xdg-user-dirs-update --set VIDEOS "$HOME/Videos"

If you wish to weed out some of these you can do so judiciously by using the xdg-user-dirs-update as detailed above...

Best Answer

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