Right I've just had the thing happen that everybody is scared sh**less of!
After doing the upgrade I went into the external hard disk where the backup file is and transferred the contents only to find some of the folders empty!!
I can see all the folders, and many of them contain other folders but no files at all. Some folders are fine with everything where it should be.
There was a horrible sinking feeling and then a scrabble to try to find if I could recover anything. Shortly afterwards a number of expletives were heard resounding around the house, which were repeated a fairly regularly over the next few days!
The situation at this point:
The files that I have identified as empty so far include a large number of photo folders, the home/snap folder which contains all the Thunderbird and Brave stuff (and strangely in brave brouser/default there's no bookmarks folder to be seen! Though it would undoubtedly be empty anyway), and some other folders of files which are fortunately saved in a previous backup.
The backup program used was Back In Time.
The hard disk is a rather old WD Elements 750GB, but nothing else appears to be corrupted on it. And yes that was the only back up I did so I have only myself to blame.....
So far I've done a Testdisk deeper search from a usb launch and I was unable to access anything useful from previous versions on the partition. Of course as I didn't realise any of this stuff was missing I merrily overwrote the partition with the new Zorin 16.2, downloaded some programs like Brave and Thunderbird and even transferred the home folder so if, as I'm guessing you'll tell me, everything tends to get written to the same areas of the disk, then I'm probably pretty bunkered!
I did see listed as a separate partition what seemed to be the previous version but when trying to see inside it I got "no file found, filesystem may be damaged".
So now I'm wondering:
Is the disappeared data actually still there on the external hard disk, just not visible? (I get "file empty" when looking but you never know....)
Is there any chance that I can somehow extract the information from the external hard disk?
The external hard disk is formatted FAT32 and i read somewhere that it should be formatted NTFS for the Backintime to work properly. Is there anything related to that which could help?
I recently deleted a copy of my home folder from a thumb drive (which would contain the missing photos), can I use Testdisk to extract them?
Finally I found a folder with half a ton of .deb files that I can't open (computer/var/cache/apt/archives). I don't really know what they are but could anything be held in there?
A lot of questions for a sunday night I know, but I'm trying to squeeze this in between a pile of other urgent things I need to deal with.
Anyway any help with this would be very much appreciated as you can imagine!
Justin
PS reminder: Asus P5KVM, Zorin 16.2 core, fingers and brain becoming arthritic