Accidentally deleted my project repo with snacks explorer, no remote backup 😭

[youyoumu]

i usually switch between buffer and the explorer using ctrl+h and ctrl+l. when i switch to the explorer it will select the current buffer file. the thing is sometimes the explorer will select the top most row (root dir) when i switch to it, and when that happen i usually do another ctrl+l + ctrl+h and it will be fixed.

i'm migrating a react project to a new monorepo, so there's a lot of moving and deleting files. i think i accidentally selecting the root directory, hit d + enter. my dev server shutdown, and lazygit crashes, and everything gone. here what it looks like with example repo

it has been 3 days of work and i plan to push it to remote repo this night. oh can someone help me to restore the files? 😭 cache, or scanning the disk. i'm so miserable right now

[drowning-cat]

Most likely you're out of luck if:

• you deleted the .git directory
• you didn't configure vim.opt.backupdir
• you haven't set up file system snapshots (keywords: btrfs, lvm, time machine, ...)

I guess snacks deletes files in the same way as rm, but I could be wrong.

I only know a method for recovering individual files using grep:

grep -b 'search-text' /dev/[your_partition] > backup.txt
grep -a -B[size before in lines] -A[size after in lines] 'search-text' /dev/[your_partition] > backup.txt

This method scans the raw disk for specific text patterns, which might help recover lost data.

[drowning-cat]

You can also try to check for your files in ~/.local/share/Trash.

Note

Apart from the issue, as a general rule, avoid using rm—it's safer to use trash-cli or similar tools (but don’t symlink rm to them).

[youyoumu]

thanks for the suggestion. i will look into trash-cli and tools like yazi (yazi.nvim), and maybe backups in general. for now, i managed to restore some files with ntfsundelete, but only those with somewhat unique filenames.

i redid the project anyway. it took another day to get it back to where it was. it sucks. i'll be more careful next time.

[youyoumu]

this just happen again. but this time i clearly see i selected the correct directory, but snacks explorer deleted my root directory instead. fortunately i already push the repo to remote, just lost 1-3 commit.

i don't know how to reproduce this, but i have the feeling of similar pattern when i was on this progress of migrating. i'll record my screen next time and see if that happen again

[drowning-cat]

#1474 (comment)

[youyoumu]

happened again, and recorded. but this time i did move action instead of delete.

as you can see i selected the task directory as target, but snacks targer root dir instead. i wish i know how to reproduce this so i can open a new issue!

explorer-selects-root-dir.mp4

[solsystemlabs]

I just had this happen to me, too. I wanted to select a range of files for deletion so I pressed Tab at the top of the list of files. I held the Tab key too long, so the selection wrapped to the top level of the list. I used Shift-Tab to undo the selection until it wrapped back to the bottom of the list, only selecting the files I wanted to delete. But when I performed the deletion it deleted the entire parent directory. Thankfully I had only done a little work since I'd last pushed, but I still lost a couple of hours.

[youyoumu]

I switch back to Neotree. Neotree doesn't allow you to delete root dir

This is related issue that i open back then #1474
I like snacks picker, the snacks explorer feels snappier than Neotree. But I think the explorer is not ready yet. It's the most recent feature created by folke, and folke is not actively working on it right now