Today had some important markdown file that accidentally deleted on my SSD and had to go over the recovery of it.
All I did was this:
run sudo systemctl status fstrim.timer to check how often TRIM runs on my system (apparently it runs weekly and the next scheduled run was in 3 days)
run sudo pacman -S testdisk
run sudo photorec
choose the correct partition where the files were deleted
choose filesystem type (ext4)
choose a destination folder where to save recovered files
start recovery
10-15 minutes and it’s done.
open nvim in parent folder and grep for content in the file that I remember adding today
That’s it - the whole process was so fast. No googling through 10 different sites with their shitty flashy UIs promising “free recovery,” wondering whether this is even trustworthy to install on your machine, dealing with installers that’ll sneak in annoying software if you click too fast, only to have them ask for payment later. No navigating complex GUIs either.
I was so thankful for this I actually donated to the maintainers of the software. Software done right.
there are lots of cheatsheets out there but the best way to learn commands is practice. different people will use different commands, so you may not need to spend time learning ffmpeg syntax whereas others find it invaluable. Google is your friend while learning. if you have a Linux question, chances are someone else has had the same question and posted about it online. as far as basics go, spend some time learning about grep and find, they are probably the two most valuable basic commands imo outside of the common ls/mkdir/etc.
as for sudo, it’s just “superuser do” so it’s essentially the same as hitting run as admin in windows. lots of times if you try to run a command without sudo that needs it, you’ll get a permission error which reminds you to run as superuser. it eventually becomes second nature to say “ah, this command needs direct access to a hardware device or system files” which means it’ll need to be run with sudo.