I have a dual monitor setup, and I had a bunch of icons on my left hand (main) monitor, and a bunch of files, folders and desktop shortcuts dragged across onto my right hand extended monitor.
I left the system switched on overnight, with the cat in the room, and this morning everything has vanished from the right hand monitor. There were a whole bunch of terminals open with a whole bunch of random cat-written garbage, clearly it’s been walking on the keyboard all night. The cat didn’t seem to have managed any coherent commands though.
Nothing in the recycle bin, and my best efforts to search the whole filesystem for the file and folder names I can remember being on the right hand monitor have failed.
Can anyone suggest methods for checking where any of this stuff might have gone?
Maybe the cat has managed to select all, shift-delete which would be very unfortunate
My desktop has a touchscreen. One summer, while I was away from my desktop for just a few minutes, a tiny insect (barely visible) landed on my Photos folder and dragged it to the Bin!
It’s possible that your cat managed to move the icons to a different folder, perhaps one of those on the desktop itself. If the suggestions by @rubi2000 don’t help, use the find command to search by name; this will include hidden folders:
find ~ -name 'name-of-file'
Otherwise, you’ll have to restore from your backup.
Thanks chaps. Tried your suggestions but It’s almost as if I’m mistaken there was anything ever there on the right hand screen to begin with. No evidence of anything anywhere. I could have sworn I had files and folders there though.
It’s not been long since a full reload of my system so I’m hoping if need be, I can get at anything important through it’s original source, emails and downloads… If there was anything there it would have mainly been desktop shortcuts and folders filled from other sources, not a lot of original material.
Comes back to the old adage doesn’t it… backup backup backup. And never underestimate children and animals!
Do you mean that you actually had files and folders on the screen. ie, in your ~/Desktop folder or were they just links to those files and folders elsewhere in your filesystem?
A mixture of desktop shortcuts, actual files (mainly text files, pdf files etc) and folders containing various actual files. Yes residing within /home/me/Desktop/
If I look inside /home/me/Desktop/ or, just look at the left hand monitor (the laptop’s builtin screen which is set as the main monitor), I can see all the files, folders and shortcuts that have always been there. It’s just the ones that I’d dragged across onto the second, righthand monitor that seem to have vanished off it, and also from /home/me/Desktop/
One other thing I noticed was, the application menu button seemed to have vanished from the left hand of the taskbar/panel. I later discovered it had jumped across to the other side of the taskbar, rather than vanishing.
I’m really wondering now if I’m imagining there ever having been any items on the right hand monitor. Maybe I’d never even started populating that side after reloading recently.
