Lost files with Cut/Paste in Caja

So I made a serious mistake doing something I almost never do that is to use cut instead of copy while in Caja file manager and going from one device to another (hard disk to usb flash storage). Big oops, since half way through the copy the flash drive stopped being able to make sense of the filesystem stored there. The flash drive seems like the messed up filesystem is pretty crappy condition since now it won’t mount and fsck will not provide a quick fix.

I am actually wondering if maybe someone in the Ubunut/Linux desktop environment if the cut files from the command in caja were somehow temporary and may still be on the disk they were getting copied from…since I really don’t have much an idea to otherwise except for the prayer that some file recovery will find some of it on the usb drive (but clearly it can’t be all because the write performed stop early too soon.)

Thoughts much appreciated…thanks

I did just post on ubuntu forum as well a similar but maybe more specific
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2408174&p=13823580#post13823580

Hopefully you haven’t turned your machine off or rebooted or anything like that. Please check the folder where you initiated the cut, and see if that file is still there. You may be able to paste it in some other folder. Let us know if you found anything like good news. Good luck @jon1.

No the system appears to have been up since, good thought @mdooley

The thing is nothing appears in the folder, by the way there were several subfolders I was attempting to copy so I am not even sure EXACTLY WHAT i’m looking for. Probably 4 or 5 of them stationed at the same source folder /home/myfolder/Documents/

But by the way I can also tell the files are not there because:

jonathan-Notebook% du -sch
256M .
256M total

And the contents I was moving were more than that (approx 500MB)

Have tried pasting the 500MB contents in another folder?

That was the first thing I did try, but it was just an unfortunate thing that by then I had already had completed some other cut and paste operation that would render it an impossible or at least improbably solution.

Got no more kiddo. Maybe someone else can pick up the slack.

  1. I would recommend looking here first —> https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
  1. Next I would reccomend looking here —> https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
  1. If all else fails, then follow this link —> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery