I once lost about 3 years of photos because my oldest daughter had filled our computer with all sorts of stuff, mostly her own photos. I deleted what I thought was a duplicate directory where my photos were, in an effort to free up disc space, only to realize that windows showed a directory that gave the appearance of the same thing in two places :) Because I deleted folders, rather than files, I wasn't able to recover any of them.
They would have been recoverable with the right tools I am reasonably sure. I can't remember what I used when I had a HD failure (was on windows back then) but it pulled the entire file tree back out the void. If you make a bootable USB stick with Linux on it you can recover files when your computer won't even boot anymore without removing the hard drive.
I once lost about 3 years of photos because my oldest daughter had filled our computer with all sorts of stuff, mostly her own photos. I deleted what I thought was a duplicate directory where my photos were, in an effort to free up disc space, only to realize that windows showed a directory that gave the appearance of the same thing in two places :) Because I deleted folders, rather than files, I wasn't able to recover any of them.
They would have been recoverable with the right tools I am reasonably sure. I can't remember what I used when I had a HD failure (was on windows back then) but it pulled the entire file tree back out the void. If you make a bootable USB stick with Linux on it you can recover files when your computer won't even boot anymore without removing the hard drive.