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I was trying to set up a family member up with Linux as a windows replacement. I installed MX Linux xfce on their laptop with separate “/” and “/home” partitions.

Through a comedy of errors, the following occurred:

• On day one, Timeshift was configured to take weekly snapshots of the system files AND their user home folder.
• The initial timeshift snapshot was begun, and then cancelled when they discovered that home files aren’t the intended target, but they noticed growing snapshot files, indicating the cancelation wasn’t complete.
• NCDU was used to remove the files in /home/timeshift
• The family member’s only copies of three days of paid work in a writing program called Bibisco (Java app) disappeared after reboot

The system was rebooted twice before the cause was discovered and shutdown with minimal (5min) use.

I’ve never done any ext4 data recovery, but the tools in Kali seem geared toward common and known filetypes (pdf, jpg, etc).

Should I be looking to restore the timeshift files, or the writing documents (with .bibisco2 file extensions)?

Is this a lost cause?

Edit: Thank you everyone for your helpful comments. In the end, time was against us and the choice was made to reinstall. After I realized the document files are just json, I looked in three Kali carving apps and the photorec app, and there were no files to recover. The freah install now has eclone set up to push regular updates from the bibisco folder to the cloud. Lesson learned.