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Where are my files from Windows 11? (swg-empire.de)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de to c/techsupport@lemmy.world

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I migrated my wife's PC after a forceful Windows 11 update to Linux. I made a backup of her files by doing an rsync of almost the complete C: drive onto an external drive formatted with exFAT. This was a grave mistake.

After the Linux installation we noticed that several files were missing and older files were back. My current guess is that I was somehow copying from an old snapshot instead of the current state.

I rsynced everything except for the Windows folder. Does anyone know if there is any chance of getting our filea back? Amd what actually happened?

Edit: After several weeks I finally found the answer. There are two drives in the laptop. But Linux didn't see the NVME drive because it does not support "RST with Optane". As soon as I switched the SATA mode over to AHCI I could see the system drive with the lost files.

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[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

In Linux. I just did an rsync -avP /source /target.

The OneDrive folder is empty except for a desktop.ini file.

[–] samwwwblack@lemm.ee 4 points 2 months ago

You probably want to check your wife's Onedrive online with a web browser as by default Windows doesn't keep files locally in Documents/Desktop/Pictures etc.

[–] Shadow@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Yeah that rsync command should be fine. I suspect you somehow copied the wrong thing, or Windows is using a non standard users folder path for some reason.

You'll probably need to cross your fingers and just look through the disk. Try the tools I mentioned above to search by disk usage, or just do find with some known file names.

[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 1 points 2 months ago

Yeah, I was pretty confident in my method, which is why I didn't bother to check if the file view in Windows was the same as in Linux. I'm currently running ncdu but I'm not very confident. A find run for a known filename yielded nothing.