How to recover deleted user with data in Ubuntu 14.04

Question

I am using Ubuntu 14.04 desktop edition. By mistake one user account deleted, which contain some data on desktop. Please help me to recover deleted data from user account or whole user account with data. I am in big trouble.

Answer 1

General information

There are several tools focusing on recovering deleted files. I do know:

• Testdisk
• PhotoRec

The following is copied from the arch wiki - which list more tools

TestDisk and Photorec are both open-source data recovery utilities licensed under the terms of the GNU Public License (GPL).

TestDisk is primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses, or human error, such as the accidental deletion of partition tables.

PhotoRec is file recovery software designed to recover lost files including photographs (Hint: PhotographRecovery), videos, documents, archives from hard disks and CD-ROMs. PhotoRec ignores the filesystem and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even with a re-formatted or severely damaged filesystems and/or partition tables.

So - if no other input comes - check out PhotoRec in the first step.

Installation

To install run

sudo apt install testdisk

or

sudo apt-get install testdisk

This should install both photorec and testdisk.

Starting the apps

You can start them by simply entering the program-name in a terminal. So enter photorec or testdisk to start the related application.

Recovering Step by Step

• A step by step guide for testdisk can be found here.
• A step by step guide for photorec can be found here.