I migrated my wife’s PC after a forceful Windows 11 update to Linux. I made a backup of her files by doing an rsync of almost the complete C: drive onto an external drive formatted with exFAT. This was a grave mistake.
After the Linux installation we noticed that several files were missing and older files were back. My current guess is that I was somehow copying from an old snapshot instead of the current state.
I rsynced everything except for the Windows folder. Does anyone know if there is any chance of getting our filea back? Amd what actually happened?
Edit: After several weeks I finally found the answer. There are two drives in the laptop. But Linux didn’t see the NVME drive because it does not support “RST with Optane”. As soon as I switched the SATA mode over to AHCI I could see the system drive with the lost files.
Check inside the OneDrive folder.
Could you have copied the wrong disk or something? Did you do the copy in windows, or Linux?
Try using something like ncdu / qdirstat to see if you can find any large folders buried elsewhere on the disk.
In Linux. I just did an rsync -avP /source /target.
The OneDrive folder is empty except for a desktop.ini file.
Yeah that rsync command should be fine. I suspect you somehow copied the wrong thing, or Windows is using a non standard users folder path for some reason.
You’ll probably need to cross your fingers and just look through the disk. Try the tools I mentioned above to search by disk usage, or just do find with some known file names.