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I'm afraid to say that this is looking strange. It's almost as if a series of directories in your home directory had been deleted, including your configuration files for some applications. Those packages that were upgraded in the ultimate upgrade could have been ones that were not allowed previously due to your Update Manager settings, but when those settings were deleted too, it somehow defaulted to letting them past.
Did you lose any data (documents etc.) due to the issue?
I don't know if I "lost" anything because (a) most of my previous folders are not showing up in File Manager and (b) those that do show up are completely empty. Whether that means that the data are gone permanently, I don't know.
No, I was not running Timeshift at the time this happened. It had been recommended and I was going to get into it today, until this happened (
BTW I'm still experiencing very noticeable latency on keystrokes.
Another thought/question. Where did my Boot sequence find a fresh instance of Mint to install?
And it could not have been that massive update that caused the problem because the fresh install of MInt that wiped out all my settings and folders had already happened before I let Update Manager install all those updates.
It must have have been one of the updates from the day before, which included that intel-microcode update.
Right, you may not like this, but I would recommend that you save any data that you have left and reinstall Mint 18.3. I don't know what has gone wrong, but it appears to be badly affecting your system and, even if you recover the system as much as you are able to, who knows what other effects there may be.
Once you have reinstalled, I recommend that, even before you run Update Manager, you set up TimeShift.
If you're up for doing this, given what you've experienced, then I can give you advice on your partitions before you reinstall.
Another thought/question. Where did my Boot sequence find a fresh instance of Mint to install?
And it could not have been that massive update that caused the problem because the fresh install of MInt that wiped out all my settings and folders had already happened before I let Update Manager install all those updates.
It must have have been one of the updates from the day before, which included that intel-microcode update.
I don't think there was a fresh instance of Mint. I just think that your previous configuration settings were wiped out by whatever wiped out several of your home directories.
On the second point, yes, that appears to have happened after the deletions occurred, and probably as a direct cause of them.
You may not ever find out what caused it. In cases like this, it's usually better just to roll back the system and work your way slowly forward again to see if it reoccurs and, if it does, where. However as you don't have any system backups or snapshots, we can't do this. So a reinstall is the next best option. It just goes to show though that having a mechanism in place for regularly backing up your data (documents, photos, music etc.) and, perhaps less regularly depending on your circumstances, backing up your system, is a must.
Text like otd, docx, pdf, audio MP3, video MP4, still photos in various formats like jpg and png, a gazillion bookmarks.
Some of the photos are backed up on USB, some of the other stuff is in the cloud in places like zoho docs and evernote. I can rebuild quite a bit with a lot of effort. But I'm feeling supremely ticked off at someone about this happening. Yes, I should have been more diligent in backing up data and system settings and lesson learned.
I gather from your very generous offer of assistance with partitioning (thank you) that we could reinstall Mint 18.3 without wiping out what may already be on the drive, possibly keeping alive the faint hope of somehow recovering it.
Do you know which directories most of the lost data would have been in? Would Documents, Music, Pictures, Videos, and perhaps Desktop, if you kept any data there, about cover it, or had you set up other directories, or kept data files in your home directory itself?
About 90% of it is in Documents, Music, Pictures. The other 10% is in a few folders in the Home directory, of which I can probably remember the folder names.
Ok. In data loss situations like this, the normal advice (don't do this) is to do a bit-by-bit copy of your hard disk to another device, and then try to recover the data from the other device. This is in order to prevent the further destruction of your data by it being overwritten. However, as your data is not crucial, and the previous step would probably inconvenience you a lot, you can try the following on your computer.
The important thing to remember is not to recover any files to your computer, particularly to the directories where you had data which has been lost (and also not to write to or make any changes in those directories). Recover files to an attached USB device.
Do the following:
Code:
apt install testdisk
Once installed, run testdisk from the command line (the choices should be self-explanatory).
OK Thank you for sticking through this with me. I greatly appreciate it. I have to go out to an appt that I can't reschedule. Will return about 3PM PDT and then do this. Thank you again.
OK Thank you for sticking through this with me. I greatly appreciate it. I have to go out to an appt that I can't reschedule. Will return about 3PM PDT and then do this. Thank you again.
Here are some instructions on using testdisk to recover files:
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