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    Even the process of shutting down can write to the hard-drive. I'm hesitant to recommend immediately unplugging your computer, because that can definitely make things much worse, but... well, depending on how important the data is, you might want to consider it. Commented May 6, 2011 at 2:24
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    Depending on the drive/OS/mount point it may be possible to immediately unmount and/or remount readonly live without turning the pc off, then shutting down etc. Commented May 6, 2011 at 3:48
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    killall rm instead of turning off.
    – Fred Nurk
    Commented May 6, 2011 at 7:19
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    Depending on how big your home directory was and how big your hard drive is, the chances of over-writing the free sectors which contains your data is pretty slim.
    – MSpeed
    Commented May 6, 2011 at 8:27
  • You can recover text files using this method without a lot of difficulty (as long as you have a rough idea of whats in them), but binary files are so difficult as to be basically impossible. Commented May 6, 2011 at 14:36