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I have lost all my PhD thesis work when I re-installed the new version of Ubuntu. How do I get the file back?

Artur Meinild
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vwe
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    I'm sorry that you lost work - but I wonder if you didn't even consider a backup of important work before reinstalling? – Artur Meinild Oct 18 '21 at 12:37
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    Just a suggestion: Regularly backup your latex files/results/codes in a private repository in GitHub, and if possible, sync it between two computers. – Archisman Panigrahi Oct 18 '21 at 12:38
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    How did you re-install? Did you maybe format the drives? Did you have your work on the same partition as / or did you maybe have a separate /home partition? – terdon Oct 18 '21 at 12:46
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    Sorry to hear you seem to have lost work. As terdon said, can you provide more details on "re-installed"? You mention the "new version". Do you mean that you installed 21.10 over an existing installation? The normal mechanism for upgrading is sudo do-release-upgrade (with some variations based on whether you are upgrading from/to an LTS (long-term support) release. – NotTheDr01ds Oct 18 '21 at 13:01
  • @vwe there are ways to try to get it back - see the links in the other comments and the closure box and you’ll find other questions on this site with useful answers. Most importantly, please don’t do anything with your machine until you’re ready to try to recover - the less you write to the hdd the lower the chance of overwriting some potentially recoverable data. For something as important as a PhD, you might want to take it to a professional data recovery service. I’m sure as the other comments have said you realise the importance of backup now! – Will Oct 18 '21 at 16:31

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