How do you recover item from lost+found?

Question

My /home partition usually contain two folders, one is named after my username and the second is lost+found. Somehow my folder named my username which contain all my files disappear, but I can find the content of it on lost+found folder. Unfortunately everything I can do is browse through them, I can't copy that file. How do you recover lost files from lost+found?

Answer 1

You may first want to know what lost+found is:

• What's lost+found and where did it come from?

The lost+found directory can only be accessed by the root user. So, to copy files, open a terminalCtrl+Alt+t and then do:

sudo su

to gain root access and then navigate to the lost+found directory.

cd /home/lost+found

then you can copy all recovered files to your home directory

mkdir $HOME/recovered\ files && cp -r /home/lost+found $HOME/recovered\ files

You will find all your recovered files in recovered files directory in your home folder.