Recover recently deleted files.
How do I do this? I want to retain the original hierarchy files and folders also.
Testdisk and Ddrescue. You'll need free space on another disk to recover the files to.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html
https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/manual/ddrescue_manual.html
Part of Testdisk, Photorec is good for finding deleted photos.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
Try booting from a copy of SystemRescueCD. It should have Testdisk included.
ddrescue is too low level. TestDisk recovers partitions, not files. PhotoRec is appropriate. It started as a tool to recover deleted pictures but it was greatly extended and can now recover many different types of files. That said, the file hierarchy and the file names are lost. I am not certain those pieces of information can be recovered. Maybe for some specific filesystems...
thanks guys decided to restore a backup from a month ago hopefully didn't loose anything important. I deleted all my files by accident because the desktop showed all my folders and files in home so thought I did the file transfer in wrong folder. I was using gnome shell 3 just to let you know. I really wasn't using my computer much so probably didn't loose anything important. Now I will be using my computer more often now since the wifi works again!!! :)
Just for your information, I have used extundelete http://extundelete.sourceforge.net/ successfully in the past.