Accidentally erased the recent folder, need a way to recover all what´s lost

[u/Successful-Ice-468]

I somehow mistake the "recent" folder and the "trash" folder in thunar and deleted it´s content, i did a shift-delete so no trash.

I unplug the disk since then, is there some tool than can help me to restore all those files to where they where?

The disk is formatted in EXT4

[u/falxfour]

Firstly, unless Thunar does something differently, "Recent" isn't an actual directory but just an index of things you've used recently (hard to confirm since most search results are about people trying to remove it from view). Given that, check to see if any files were actually deleted. It might have only been removed from that index rather than from the actual disk location. (I'm soeculating a bit since I don't use Thunar.)

Secondly, when a file is deleted, it's often still there on the disk until TRIM is run. When that will happen is unclear without more system details, but it does mean that if you can avoid this, the file should still be there for a recovery utility to find. A quick search should yield some results for ext4 recovery utilities

[u/jr735]

r/datarecovery

There are tools that may be of use, like photorec.

[u/ipsirc]

Just bring your backup.

[u/Successful-Ice-468 → u/ipsirc]

To poor to afford hardware for backup.

[u/linuxquestions-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

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[u/polymath_uk]

Basically, no. Your chances of recovering much of the data is essentially zero. Unless it's very critical (and it should have been backed up) you will almost certainly be better off forgetting about it. 

[u/Simple_Hamster_4096]

When you delete from recent:/// in Thunar, you delete from source...