So I went and did it (though I'm not quite sure how): through whatever false maneuver, I deleted my entire /home/trenien folder. By the time I realized it, the system had recreated it.
I believe there must have been 2-5 minutes between the deletion and me understanding what the problem was, but the only thing written were the new default user folders. So, hopefully, this might have screwed a few of the deleted files through rewriting over them, but not that many as I didn't do anything more, shut down the computer and restarted it under a live disk.
The computer has just finished copying over an image of the entire disk to another HDD, so it's now time to try and recover my life (part of what was deleted is backed up, but that's not the case for way too many files). Question is, how? I've been looking it up but so far, I've only found how to recover a deleted partition (as in, the partition itself doesn't appear anymore) or a single file. the partition is there and it isn't faulty as far as I know and there is no way I'm going to recover the 100s/1000s individual files by hand.
Ideally, I hope there is still a backup of the pre-delete state of the partition that I could restore, but I've no idea how to do that. any help?
Thanks
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