Data Recovery Time Capsule

Late last year, I managed to lose around 4TB of data when I migrated back to Windows after using Linux as my daily OS for several years - most of my time at University in fact. Baring the period I spent using Mac OS (until my former housemate knocked a glass of red wine over my Macbook Air.... Looking back now, I'm not sure what I was more upset about - the macbook or the wine!).

The loss occured when I tried to mount EXT4 partitions to Windows without any assistance from WSL/WSL2 or any other conversion. I know what you're thinking - you bloody idiot! What a noob move!

I agree. As soon as I'd done it, I realised but the damage was already done. The partitions were lost - or at least, temporarily lost. It took a little while but I managed to recover the partitions using a combination of GPartd and third party recovery software. There are tutorials for Gpartd here, I'm not going to give a tutorial or the commands I used out of risk of causing data loss to someone else as it's not an area that I'd consider myself an expert in; but did manage to succeed in this case. Thanks to Andy Hancock for his advice on tools.

In total, I recovered 99.9% of my data including my entire instagram cache, so I'll post some photos here. I suppose this does raise the question though as to why Microsoft aren't directly supporting EXT4 mounts without WSL support. I'd wager it would increase the conversion from Desktop Linux, perhaps even MacOS.