no, it just wanted to wipe the whole disk, i couldnt see any option for this anywhere
I’ve lost count how many hundreds of installations of Fedora I’ve done. It definitely does not. To wipe the whole disk you have to explicitly click a button to Delete All (partitions). That’s the only way it’ll wipe the whole disk.
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well for the people who HAVENT done it hundreds of time it sure is hard to find and i couldnt
why cant ppl understand not everyones experts?
and if youre wondering what i was typing before i realised it was the wrong keyboard, it was ‘maybe the problem is nobody steps back and imagines what its like to use this when you HAVNT used it hundreds of times’
the installer really sucks
Just one entry makes me think you’re at a dracut prompt, the system hasn’t assembled itself correctly so we’re not seeing the persistent journal with all boots in it. Just the current volatile journal. Dracut shell is very limited, it’s really for experts and isn’t user friendly at all.
If sudo find / -name "*.ods" doesn’t reveal any of your spreadsheets, well near as I can tell they probably aren’t on this drive.
I realize it’s rude and maybe a little mean, but it’s still true: if you have important data, you back it up. If you aren’t willing to back it up, it isn’t important (to you). It’s just unproductive to blame everyone and everything else for a collision of (a) bad luck and (b) bad choices you made. Data loss is painful, that’s why there’s so much harping about backing up.
As for getting this journald log out and posted somewhere, I’m unable to think of a non-tedious way to explain how to do that…
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I DID BACK IT UP
why cant people read before attacking people?
i had synthing set up and TESTED to REMOTELY back up for exactly this sort of situation and for some reason fedora turned it off
how am i supposed to know that , i cant spend every moment of a working day checking re checking re re re checking to see whats randomly broken next
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The gist is:
insert an already formatted usb stick, mount it, journalctl > /path/to/mountpoint
If it is dracut, I usually mount to /sysroot
No you configured something that you thought would back it up, but didn’t actually confirm it had worked. This is a brand new installation of a distro you’re not familiar with and you’re just going to blindly trust important files are backed up without confirming it? I don’t do that with important data - been bitten too many times by making such assumptions. Doesn’t matter if it’s macOS, Windows, Fedora or anything else. Confirm the backup worked. I even test restoring the data.
how am i supposed to know that , i cant spend every moment of a working day checking re checking re re re checking to see whats randomly broken next
But you can spend every moment experiencing data loss as a result of not checking and have time to blame everyone and everything else for you not checking? That just is an unworkable criticism. You have to take responsibility for your data and stop blaming others.
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Dont talk down to me when you didnt bother reading, yes is DID confirm it worked before i started the job
ffs this place is as bad as reddit, everyones jurt either says ‘there no problem, everything works fine!’ - even though your computer literlly doesnt work - or treats you like your an idiot because you havent been using linux for 100 years and installed it 100000 times in your sleep and know how to do everything oh and its YOUR FAULT anyway becasue you should know this whole thing is awful and you need to check your backups every 30 seconds. i bet even if i did that you’d still say its my fault for not checking them every 10 secvonds
IM SORRY i didnt know how to use the installer or make better backups of my backups of my snapshots of my backups or just know every command off by heart thats why im here askign for help and instead i feel like im being led around by the nose so ppl can laugh at me and call me an idiot
Ok well there’s something wrong with your process because your important data is missing from two locations: original and backup.
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see this is exactly what i mean, why is the dfefault assumption : “oh well somethings wrong with YOUR process, fedora NEVER does ANYTHING wrong” when it literally wont even boot
what reason do you even have to blame my ‘process’? its just syncthing, it works fine on ubuntu and windows and even my phone, and it LITERALLY CANT DELETE FILES WHEN IN RECIEVE ONLY MODE so why are you just handwaving those facts away and blaming me straight away anyway
Yes. It’s your important data. If it’s important, make certain it’s copied somewhere reliably.
instead i feel like im being led around by the nose so ppl can laugh at me and call me an idiot
You’re accusing people trying to help you of laughing at you and ridiculing you. Think about that for a minute. Or even two minutes. And guess what? Everyone who has ever gotten stuck in dracut knows it’s PITA limited environment that requires esoteric skills most people don’t have. It isn’t a better experience because it’s rare people get stuck in it so why spend the resources?
You’ve been overwhelmed by a lot of advice. All of the advice is well intentioned but not well organized or structured because everyone helping is an individual. They’re coming at this with their own experiences in mind.
It’s 3am for me and I’m going to bed. If someone can help @timmithy extract the journal with step by step, I will look at the log and see if there is any clue for a simple fix to get this system unbroken and bootable.
But if at the same time we can also get @timmithy to boot Fedora installation media and mount the file system and search it for his files, that would be a great parallel strategy. For those who can follow… once Live booted, use lsblk or blkid to figure out which partition has btrfs, and just mount it to /mnt and then do find on that path. There aren’t any snapshots so it shouldn’t take long and by mounting the top level of the Btrfs file system all the subvolumes will get searched just in case this data is not in /home for some reason.
Once that search is done have him do dmesg|grep -i btrfs and post that output somewhere. If there’s any inconsistencies in the file system, no matter if it’s a btrfs bug or hardware issue, btrfs will complain rather verbosely.
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Yes. You are making accusations without evidence. It’s normal for people to push back on your claims because you are accusing an inanimate object of doing things it’s not expressly designed to do. You’re in effect saying Fedora is full of witches that are deleting only your files and no one else’s.
No one can explain that. You can’t even explain it. But you are making exactly that accusation. So maybe stop doing that so people can help you.
why are you just handwaving those facts away and blaming me straight away anyway
Let’s pretend there’s a distro called Destroy My Data. Anything you put anywhere near it is destroyed.
You definitely get to blame Destroy My Data OS for data loss. Everyone will agree with you because everyone knows Destroy My Data OS destroys data.
But you are still also to blame because you’re the human in charge of your important data. If your data is lost because you didn’t keep a copy away from Destroy My Data OS, it’s your fault. You’re the ultimate guardian of your important data. No one else.
It’s not about blame. It’s about responsibility.
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This is nuts, its like you’re just straight up choosing not to read what i write . i DID make certain it was being copied
You’re accusing people trying to help you of laughing at you and ridiculing you. Think about that for a minute. Or even two minutes.
youre not helping me, youre jsut saying over and over and over ‘its your fault for not backing up your data’ even when i explain that i DID
the whole computer crashed wont boot and my files are gone, with no action on my part? the whole installation is literally evidence sitting right in front of me, much more than there is for 'oh um uh …syncthing probably ignored its own settings on two seperate computers at the same time and did it, but also its your fault"
theres STACKS of hits on google too for btrfs breaking ppl’s systems when they get full (or even just at random):
this is completely insane and makes no sense at all
what youre doing is more like telling someone its their fault for using ‘Backup My Data OS’, and then getting surprised when it didn’t actually backup their data the moment after they installed and ran “test your backup”.
how is it reasonable to expect ppl to magically, instantly know when their previously tested working backup has randomly stopped becasue of an external factor? do i just never do anything with my computer ever, other than check syncthing over and over in an endless loop? and if i take my eyes off it for one second and it fails …somehow thats the my fault?
the whole premise is unreasonable, its 100% victimblaming and im done with it
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This seems like a very complex issue, and at the moment, my reading of everyone’s replies seems to indicate that we haven’t figured out what caused it or how we can get more information about the error and/or backups.
We’re all very very sorry that this has happened. I still don’t know why multiple failures all happened at once—syncthing, backups, the whole crash.
Everyone: please feel free to continue the discussion if you see fit but I do want to note that we must all remain excellent to each other. Please ask yourself if your next post is following this guiding principle before you reply.
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@chrismurphy calm down, he’s clearly frustrated and your current responses are not helping at all!
This is the reason why I was trying to persuade you @timmithy to skip trying to diagnose why your system is not booting and try the data recovery, since it’s the only thing that may rescue your data at this point.
To get functional system so that you can attempt datarecovery, you can use the live USB that you used for the instalation - just boot the live system from it
Then go to GitHub - danthem/undelete-btrfs: A script that attempts to undelete files in a BTRFS file system. Make sure you read the README. and download the undelete.sh from there (you then may need to use chmod +x to make it executable: https://askubuntu.com/questions/443789/what-does-chmod-x-filename-do-and-how-do-i-use-it#443799)
And follow instructions from that github page - the gist of it is, if the filesystem from which you wish to recover data is allready mounted, unmount it, then tell the script which device contains the btrfs filesystem with data to recover and destination where you want the data to be restored, it will then ask what it should look for and then you pray it finds it
I’m sorry I can’t give you more specific instructions about what device should you point the script to, or how exactly to mount the filesystem, since you are using luks which I’m not familiar with at all 
If you need more help with data recovery from BTRFS, I again strongly suggest you to join their official IRC channel:
People over there are very knowledgable about BTRFS and I’m sure they will be able to help you recover any of the data that are still present on that btrfs filesystem
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I use FreeBSD’s doas instead of sudo to elevate privileges because of it’s minimal and simpler configuration.
https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/doas
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=doas&sektion=1&manpath=freebsd-release-ports