Strange data loss
Hello everybody:
My work laptops come with Ubuntu 20.04 and a very strange thing happened
to a colleague of mine (I'm asking here because I think what happened
doesn't depend on the distribution): he was working with Filezilla and
suddenly he lost all the data (I think it's regardless that you were
working with Filezilla) from your home folder and it appeared as newly
installed. However, the rest of the operating system continued to
function without problems.
He is a person that I trust hasn't done anything "weird". The laptop is
a Dell Latitude 3510 Intel i3 with a 256 GB SSD M.2 PCIe NVMe drive. The
entire system is installed on a single partition with ext4.
After the disaster I recovered the data with Photorec and sorted by
extension, but since most of the filenames are lost the solution is
partial. In addition, many project files, which are located in folders,
are scattered by extension, and it is very difficult to restore such data.
This is something that hasn't happened to me in 20 years of intensive
use of GNU/Linux. I would understand it with a mechanical drive if it
had taken a hit running but with SSDs I don't understand it.
I did not find any bad sectors with the badblocks command. I checked
with fsck and it fixed quite a few entries but no lost+found files
showed up. Gnome-disk-utility tells me that the disk is ok and
smartmontools tells me that it can't look at the log. Memtest also did
not give any faults in RAM memory.
Just in case anyone has any idea what might have happened.
Thanks and regards
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