Reinstalling Unity would be
sudo apt-get install --reinstall ubuntu-desktop
but I don't know if this will help.
Of course you can access and copy your files from the TTY - you can do everything there if you don't mind a little typing...
You know the directory and file name of your document? Super!
Just run the following command to copy it wherever you want:
cp /PATH/TO/YOUR/DOCUMENT.FILE /PATH/TO/YOUR/TARGET.FILE
If you can't remember the path, use find
. Let's assume you know the file name contains "personal" and is a .pdf file, then you can run
find ~ -iname "*personal*.pdf" 2> /dev/null
where the ~
(= your home directory) is the path to search in and *
are wildcards which can stand for anything. The command could e.g. spot the file /home/YOURUSERNAME/Documents/PersonalDocument.PDF
If you want to copy the file to an external drive or another partition which does not get automounted at boot, you have to mount it manually. Therefore you need to know the device path which you can find out with lsblk
. Search through the output for a partition (name sdXN
, where X is a letter and N a number) that fits the size of your drive. If you are not sure, compare the outputs before and after plugging the drive in. I will assume your drive's partition is /dev/sdc1
.
To mount the partition /dev/sdc1
of your device, you first need to create a folder as mount point. You may chose the name and location randomly, but I would recommend you to put it inside /mnt
(which requires root permissions). After that, you mount the partition to this directory:
sudo md /mnt/MYDEVICE
sudo mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/MYDEVICE
Now you can access the files and folders in your device as if they were located inside the directory /mnt/MYDEVICE
.
After you are finished, unmount the device with umount
(not unmount)
sudo umount /dev/sdc1