Recover deleted or overwritten files

[Naewyng]

Does anybody know of any linux utility that works on the Steam Deck, that can be used to recover deleted files or overwritten files?

Basically, because of how utter garbage the steam cloud is, I made the horrible mistake of playing a game on my PC instead of the deck, and the cloud save from my deck (which is where I played as recently as 20240913) was overwritten by the save from my PC (which was from 20210420) because steam cloud is bullsh*t. Then I launched the game on my deck and my local saves were overwritten...

Now I was trying to see if there's any utility I can use to get the past content of the files. This game saves everything in a single file, at a specific path.

[Broseph Joseph]

photorec

[Naewyng]

Originally posted by Broseph Joseph:

photorec

Does it also recover previous versions of files that still exist? Basically the save file that already existed, was overwritten by steam cloud.

[Mahjik]

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/top-best-linux-data-recovery-tools

[PopinFRESH]

Sadly, it is very unlikely you'll be able to recover it as the filesystem used to overlay for `/home/deck/` doesn't support file versioning; and it's stored on flash media. If the files were just deleted then it would be far more likely to recover via those utilities because when you delete a file on an ext4 filesystem it simply removes the inode pointer but the data isn't actually removed or changed until something else is written to those storage addresses.

Steam Cloud should have prompted when there is a discrepancy between a local save file and the Cloud saves in this type of situation; did you not get that prompt or did you just not understand the prompt?

[Naewyng]

Originally posted by PopinFRESH:

Sadly, it is very unlikely you'll be able to recover it as the filesystem used to overlay for `/home/deck/` doesn't support file versioning; and it's stored on flash media. If the files were just deleted then it would be far more likely to recover via those utilities because when you delete a file on an ext4 filesystem it simply removes the inode pointer but the data isn't actually removed or changed until something else is written to those storage addresses.

Steam Cloud should have prompted when there is a discrepancy between a local save file and the Cloud saves in this type of situation; did you not get that prompt or did you just not understand the prompt?

No, I didn't get any prompt.

So what happened is that the game didn't initially have steam cloud support, so I played the game on PC in 2021, and then replayed it in 2024 on the steam deck. I last played it in mid september.

The game got steam cloud support in july 2024, so my steam deck files SHOULD have gone on the cloud.

Then just yesterday I launched the game on PC and it overwrote the steam cloud with it's own files, for some weird reason, without even telling me that the files were out of sync. And then I made another mistake by running the game on the deck...

[PopinFRESH]

Originally posted by Naewyng:

Originally posted by PopinFRESH:

Sadly, it is very unlikely you'll be able to recover it as the filesystem used to overlay for `/home/deck/` doesn't support file versioning; and it's stored on flash media. If the files were just deleted then it would be far more likely to recover via those utilities because when you delete a file on an ext4 filesystem it simply removes the inode pointer but the data isn't actually removed or changed until something else is written to those storage addresses.

Steam Cloud should have prompted when there is a discrepancy between a local save file and the Cloud saves in this type of situation; did you not get that prompt or did you just not understand the prompt?

No, I didn't get any prompt.

So what happened is that the game didn't initially have steam cloud support, so I played the game on PC in 2021, and then replayed it in 2024 on the steam deck. I last played it in mid september.

The game got steam cloud support in july 2024, so my steam deck files SHOULD have gone on the cloud.

Then just yesterday I launched the game on PC and it overwrote the steam cloud with it's own files, for some weird reason, without even telling me that the files were out of sync. And then I made another mistake by running the game on the deck...

The desktop client definitely wouldn't have overwritten a save in the cloud without prompting you about the cloud saves being out of sync and asking which version/file you wanted to keep. From your description I think what likely happened is that you installed the game on your Steam Deck and it didn't have Steam Cloud support, when you played it after Steam Cloud support was added your Steam Deck potentially wasn't connected to a public network or wasn't able to reach the Steam servers when you exited the game and thus no save file from your Steam Deck was uploaded to Steams servers. Then when you installed it and played it on your Desktop it already supported it and thus it created its save file in on Steam Cloud. When you then played it on your Steam Deck after that your Steam Deck was connected to a public network and sync'd from the cloud save.

I believe you still should have gotten a conflict prompt on that last part when trying to launch it on your Steam Deck because there would have been local files that had a different date / checksum from the files on Steam Cloud. It could also be something on the developers end where they did something wonky when implementing Steam Cloud saves so it might be worth asking in the Games discussions. Also, if you check in desktop mode on your Steam Deck and browse to the games path in /home/deck/ (assuming you installed the game on the internal SSD) and see if possibly there was no prompt because the save file structure changed and your old saves might still be present but just ignored in-game because there is a newer save file.

Which game was this from?

[Pyrocumulous]

I just had this happen to me for Metal Gear Solid 3. Rather frustrating as I fired up Deck to make dang sure it was synced before I launched Steam on my desktop, and I was transported back in time. I can see my Steam achievements from a few days ago, but the steam cloud saves with that date are way old. Ugh.