How to recover `rm -r` deleted folder

Posted on December 9, 2016

Dear community,

I have been working on some sites on my droplet, I went to delete a folder in the apps root and I accidentally deleted the entire apps root using rm -r (with f or a wildcard idr)

I know rm is dangerous command, I know I have to enable backups, but is there anyway I can recover all the files from the cloud? I went to use photorec but it tells me no hard disk found, meaning that’s cloud I assume.

I also have a backup archive but the sad thing is I had it stuck at 99% and cancelled, now I can tell it is corrupted archive and fixing it gives me only 2 folders while it is for the whole apps root.

Any thoughts?

TYVM!

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Ryan Quinn

December 9, 2016

There are a few tools that can attempt to recovery data in this situation but it’s highly likely that the data will not be recoverable. A few threads that talk about various options are here, here and here

alexdo

June 30, 2024

Heya,

Even though you mentioned you didn’t enable backups, it’s worth double-checking:

DigitalOcean Snapshots:

Log in to your DigitalOcean Control Panel.
Navigate to the “Droplets” section.
Check if there are any snapshots that were taken automatically or manually. If you find one, you can create a new droplet from the snapshot to recover your files.

Backups:

Again, check if you might have enabled backups at any point. These are different from snapshots and might provide another route to recovery.

If snapshots and backups are not available, you can try using testdisk to recover deleted files. testdisk is a powerful data recovery tool that can work in some cloud environments. You can also check this article:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-testdisk-on-linux-and-recover-deleted-files

Hope that this helps!