I'm lollygagging around while Testdisk runs from this latest Dr460nized ISO on my external 750 gig HDD I use to contain backups of all of my data. It is going to take awhile.
Then I am going to run Testdisk on my 1 terabyte internal HDD, which I normally use for data storage, and it contains copies of everything on the external drive...except while in the process of copying over data from the external to newly formatted internal drive yada, yada, I made the rookie mistake of deleting the wrong set of data. One set was intentional, the other was not.
I didn't panic but I did think about getting drunk and crying. Since I was booted into this live ISO, I browsed the Arch Wiki, then installed Testdisk from the AUR. It's been running for a little while--10% now completed. If I'm unhappy with those results I'll try Photorec.
One small saving grace is that I have all of my Music and about 250 GB of 650 gigs of my favorite Videos, mostly movies, on my Android tablet & SD chip, so some of the pain has subsided. Unfortunately, it appears all of my small config files, scripts, and personal docs have vanished into the mist. We'll see. It may be that text files recover more fully than compressed audio/video and photos. Maybe.
I, uh, probably haven't made this big an error resulting in data loss since Windows 95 ate my lunch.
Sigh...
Silliness Factor off the charts. Laughing trumps crying.
EDIT: Woohoo! Just found copies of all of my Arch configs & scripts backed-up to my Google Drive. I had forgotten I had set my Docs folder synced to that, it's been so long! Woohoo!
EDIT 2: Started concurrent recovery of my Internal HDD data drive formatted in Ext4. Running much faster.
Morning wine's not so bad, either. Sob
EDIT 3: Recovered from morning wine. Unfortunately Testdisk did not. Photorec seems to be doing better.
EDIT 4: Photorec did the job! Not only did it resurrect all of my data, but also a lot of data that had been previously deleted on that drive some time back. Now begins the laborious task of sifting through 157 folders totaling 750 GB, gleaning and restoring pictures, documents, videos, music, and downloads. I may write a small bash script. Nothing has to be restored immediately. sigh I'm getting too old for this shit.