files disappeared

[Chris Green]

On Fri, Jul 03, 2015 at 08:14:10PM +0200, Petter Adsen wrote:
> On Fri, 03 Jul 2015 11:15:11 -0500
> Linda <haniganwork at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 
> > I am using Lubuntu 14.04.2.  I was looking at a file in a 
> > directory earlier this morning and everything was fine. Then 
> > I went back to check something and every file has 
> > disappeared from that directory.
> > They do not appear in Trash and they do not appear in the 
> > terminal window with a ls -la, however they do appear with 
> > locate. They also don't appear in recent opened files in 
> > Libre Office even though that is what I looked at them with. 
> > Any ideas how or why they disappeared and how I can recover 
> > them?
> 
> The reason they still appear when you run locate is that locate
> searches a database, it doesn't actually search the file system like
> for example 'find' does. The database has not been updated since before
> the files were deleted, that's why they are still listed.
> 
> How/why they disappeared? I don't know. Could be disk/filesystem
> corruption (in which case there should be hints in the system logs),
> the system might have been compromised, or it could just be user error
> (more likely, easy to do). Files generally don't delete themselves
> without trace.
> 
However you can tell locate to check if a file exists after
having found it in the database.  Give it the -e option, then it will
only show you files that actually exist 'now'.

-- 
Chris Green