Data Recovery with Testdisk, fixing dumb
Data Recovery, fixing dumb
Recently while doing some Puppy install testing I hooked up a hard drive, grabbed my Ventoy USB and booted into a Pup. Started Gparted and deftly deleted the existing partitions and clicked Apply.
Only then did my brain reengage and realize the computer had not recognized the hard drive and I had just deleted everything on the Ventoy USB. DOOH!
Looked over into the mirror and thought "Today, this is what dumb looks like" 
Did have a backup of the USB, but it was old. It was time for me to renew my acquaintance with Testdisk. Testdisk has been mentioned on the forum before, but worth plugging again here in the Repair section. It is a free cross-platform partition and file recovery program. It can be installed from the PPM or using other package managers. It does not have a menu entry.
Once installed:
-open a terminal
-type: testdisk
-press: enter
Testdisk will open and it is a menu driven application, so there's no need to enter complex command line strings. There are many howto's on the web and it's not hard to use.
A few minutes later I had recovered all of my customized files and drive structure. I did have to reinstall Ventoy and copy over my ISO's, but the hard part had been saved. 
Should you find yourself in need of a data recovery program give this one a try. 
wizard