Real talk, if you want the actual data recovery perspective

If your system is on an SSD, first thing is you’ve got about 10 minutes (or less) to shutdown and use a recovery program before TRIM comes and irrecoverably deletes it. (Not applicable to all systems, some have slower TRIM timing, some faster, some instant and some not enabled at all (Sounds preposterous now, but it was an issue for a hot minute, so old systems might still be affected))

If HDD, just don’t start writing to disk a bunch of shit and you can grab a cup of coffee before shutting down

From there, you need to remove the disk and have an adapter for it to USB or another system DURING ANY DATA RECOVERY, ALWAYS WORK FROM AN IMAGE, NOT THE DRIVE ITSELF (Especially for “iffy” drives (If you know that it is damaged in some way, or you just can’t afford it and won’t soon, please get with a professional service. With data recovery from potentially damaged drives, you might get one shot to get a good image and it’s done for).

Once you have your image, there’s a bunch of different recovery software you can use. My personal favorite and go-to is R-Studio. It’s well worth the $50, but you can sail the high seas for it as well. But you’ll need to take some time to get used to it, it’s not…the most user friendly out there lmao.

If you need something user friendly, try Recuva or Disk Drill. Just do NOT waste your money with shovelware like anything made by Wondershare.