Not meaning to sound unsympathetic here, but there's a harsh lesson about computers that every serious computer user will be put through at some point or other (although many choose not to learn the lesson) - that's simply: if you value your data,
keep backups.
Something one needs to bear in mind. Hard drives have a finite lifespan. Some will last a very long time without problems, some ... do not (the last time it happened to me, the drive was about 18 months old), but sooner or later, every hard drive will die, sometimes without warning, and sometimes without any means of recovering your data. So even without OS 'errors', user error, whatever, no data on a computer is safe.
Backup anything valuable. Do it often. Keep more than one backup.
If you want to be really safe and secure, keep one of those backups in a different building.
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