I accidentally deleted some essential system files

So, I accidentally deleted several directories from /usr...
I have a ton of data on that computer that I cannot loose and cannot back up
A bunch of packages like su, sudo, and even pacman are not there anymore
Hypothetically, if I were to run this machine in a chroot, could I run pacstrap and get all the packages again? Or, will I have to run it in a chroot and manually download each package?
Will either of these delete data from my computer? Will either of these even work?
Last edited by dubble (2014-06-12 21:04:28)

Id like to offer a few recommendations to prevent this in the future.
First, I concur with everyone above- have a backup! It makes problems like these no big deal. A liveCD and rsync will have you back in business in no time.
Second, if you use BTRFS, snapshots are an awesome feature. You could literally rm -rf /etc and all youd have to do is boot a prior snapshot. (P.S. Dont do this for any reason, even if you know what youre doing. It will work, but dont). I have my rootfs in a subvolume, and I have a snapshots subvolume. I have a bash script that takes snapshots once a week (total of 3) and I update using my own script that integrates optional preupgrade snapshots (in case the latest upgrade causes breakage due to Arch's rolling nature), news feeds, etc. You might want to consider something like this..
Third, there is a cool utility called pakbak that could have saved you in this situation. It backs up your pacman databases whenever a database change happens. You could have restored pacman and your databases, then made sure everything was installed properly.
Good to see you got out without data loss. Ive lost data due to not having a backup and it sucks!
**EDIT** Link to pakbak in the AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/pakbak-git/
Last edited by GSF1200S (2014-06-15 08:10:31)

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