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I have a number of media files backed up from an old phone to a hard drive. I was trying to copy all my backups to another drive. I encountered a contradictory message like "Could not copy file [...] No such file or directory". I took a note of the location and let the job finish.

I then went back and had a look with ls. The output suggests that 2 files are there and yet don't exist at the same time. I can see the files are missing an extension:

terminal output

Attempting to copy the files via the command line gives message "No such file or directory". These are all audio files but attempting to open them via the command line with vlc yields "cannot open file [...] (No such file or directory)"

I'm reluctant to try to rename the files to add an extension without making copies first but I can't do that. I'm looking for suggestions to recover what is there or to help me interpret all those question marks in the output of ls -la

OS is Ubuntu Mate 20.04

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  • Have you checked the permission on those folder and files?
    – amar
    Commented Jun 9 at 22:00
  • Thanks for your input. I am indeed the owner of the directory. If it were a permissions issue, I would expect a very different message, certainly not those question marks in the ls -la output
    – user1007074
    Commented Jun 9 at 22:09
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    Looks like filesystem corruption. Have you run a fsck on the filesystem? Did anything show up in the /lost+found directory?
    – ubfan1
    Commented Jun 9 at 22:13
  • Thanks, I have not run fsck yet, this drive is my main backup and I'm reluctant to do so before copying the data elsewhere.
    – user1007074
    Commented Jun 10 at 7:55
  • Dear downvoters: please comment and suggest improvements. Your input is in no way constructive otherwise
    – user1007074
    Commented Jun 10 at 7:56

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