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EWS Labs, Restoring lost, deleted or corrupted files

Overview

The EWS home directory file server makes daily backups of everyone's home directories, including all of your files and folders. If you accidentally delete or corrupt a file, you can restore an older version.

This can be done on both EWS Windows and Linux.

Note: EWS Home Directories from the previous semester have been archived and are unavailable to restore with the instructions below. If you need help restoring something, please submit a help request for assistance at: https://go.illinois.edu/ewshelp

Windows

  • Right click the folder that contains (or contained) the file you want to restore. Click on Restore previous versions

  • You will be presented a list with all the backups present for the folder. Open and browse it like any other folder. Copy it over to a new location (restoring it), which will overwrite the current folder and all its contents with the older version.

Linux

  • Open a terminal window. This must be done on an EWS Linux lab machine, or over SSH.
  • To navigate to your home directory ".snapshot" directory, Open the .snapshot directory with Nautilus
      • Run: nautilus ~/.snapshot
      • You can also browse the .snapshot directory from the terminal with "cd .snapshot" and then list them with "ls"
    • You will be presented with ten days worth of backups of your entire home directory. Browse them as you would any other file.
    • The backups in this directory are read-only. You will need to copy the files you want to restore somewhere you can work with them - your desktop for example.
      .snapshot Directories listed in Nautilus

    • Backups occur overnight, and capture the last 10 days you accessed your EWS account.

    Keywords:
    restore restoring files delete deleted file corrupted lost missing remove removed 
    Doc ID:
    81207
    Owned by:
    Khlaf A. in Engineering IT
    Shared Services
    Created:
    2018-03-28
    Updated:
    2025-02-03
    Sites:
    University of Illinois Engineering IT