Yeah but backup is the most optimistic scenario. I’m looking for something that really bad happened and maybe the data wasn’t overwritten so I can find it and copy.
I have used PhotoRec in the past (~10 years or so) when I needed to restore pictures from a SD-Card (FAT). It worked pretty well. If there are more modern solutions I would also like to get to know them.
If you use BTRFS, there are also some people in Fedora Discuss that may know more about that.
Those tools probably all work with BTRFS. PhotoRec is btw related to the bigger Testdisk.
All these tools seem hardly maintained, but also kinda limited in what they need to do do its okay. Not with BTRFS, bcachefs, f2fs etc though as these may have new fancy tricks.
I was looking for an NTFS restore tool, and used photorec, testdisk, recuva (which very likely just uses testdisk or has cloned its code) and not yet scalpel.
I used Clonezilla where these tools are all preinstalled, it loads to RAM and just works really well.
Testdisk gave me tons of corrupted files with missing headers, but likely the correct ones. PhotoRec gave nothing useful, only stuff from the cache that was likely in the “trash” and not actually deleted. It seems it only recovers intact files, which are nearly never the needed ones.
I need a tool to restore the headers of common file types, as Windows stores them seperately afaik.
I guess a dedicated BTRFS tool could help a lot, as there are likely more ways to recover. But testdisk should work fine.
Those are for snapshots not like data crawing. More like a backup your data tool than you fucked up but maybe something is written so you can have it back.