Plasma Notes contents vanished on upgrade (Kubuntu)

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1

HI all

I need a little help from all of you: I had several plasma Notes in my 22.04 Kubuntu desktop area and I recently upgraded to the latest version. My notes are now vanished and I’m trying to dig in my user space for any fragment that can tell me where are they gone and recover them, even partially. Yes, I had sensitive info and it will cost me a lot of work to get each of the contents (tips, bash scripts, excel formulas, phones numbers, etc.).

(if only I was warned that I’ll loose my desktop Notes contents…)

Thanks for any help.
Olivier

2

On this Kubuntu 23.04, plasma 5.27.4, they’re in ~/.local/share/plasma_notes, in files named by a GUID. They’re in HTML, and they go back a couple of years, though until today I’ve only ever created them by accident. Here’s hoping yours go back, too.

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3

In case you got your note empty due to plasma crash or ruined by update:
First of all try not to write on the disk.

How to recover your lost plasma notes via Photorec:

Install the Testdisk

$ sudo apt install testdisk

Run photorec as root

$ sudo photorec

  1. Select the disk with the lost files using the Down/Up arrow keys and press “Enter” to [Proceed ].
  2. Select a partition using the ‘Down/Up’ arrow keys, then select [File Opt] using the ‘Right’ arrow key and press ‘Enter’.
  3. Press the ‘s’ key to reset the selection of all file types, then scroll down and select only file types tx? and txt using the ‘Space’ key, and then press the ‘b’ key and then ‘Enter’ to save this selection.
  4. Press the ‘Q’ button to return to the previous partition selection screen.
  5. Use the ‘Left’ arrow key to select [ Search ] and press ‘Enter’.
  6. Select the correct file system for your partion and press ‘Enter’.
  7. Now use the ‘Down/Up’ arrow keys to select the destination folder where the recovered files will be placed (don’t select the same partition, use another mounted partition with enough space) and press the ‘C’ key to start the recovery search.

When finished, you got several recup_dir.* folders in the destination folder with a large number of files recovered with Photoreс. Now it’s time to navigate to the destination folder (via cd) containing the recup_dir.* folders
and run this command to find the files containing the recovered notes:

$ ls -d recup_dir.* | while read i; do cd "$i"; grep -l '<html><head><meta name="qrichtext"' $(pwd)/*; cd ..; done

/media/user/data/rec/recup_dir.149/f134969072.html
/media/user/data/rec/recup_dir.150/f135503232.html
/media/user/data/rec/recup_dir.151/f138317200.html
/media/user/data/rec/recup_dir.159/f153771840.html
/media/user/data/rec/recup_dir.179/f195561096.html
/media/user/data/rec/recup_dir.180/f196286808.html
/media/user/data/rec/recup_dir.180/f196407856.html
/media/user/data/rec/recup_dir.180/f196544944.html
/media/user/data/rec/recup_dir.180/f196554976.html
/media/user/data/rec/recup_dir.196/f324575728.html
/media/user/data/rec/recup_dir.198/f325003864.html
/media/user/data/rec/recup_dir.81/f71891808.html
/media/user/data/rec/recup_dir.94/f90950656.html
/media/user/data/rec/recup_dir.94/f91196936.html
/media/user/data/rec/recup_dir.96/f92791792.html