Is it worth pursuing further?

[pygy]

Hi there,

I lost a bit of source code in a freak rm -r accident (really, a fs-extra fs.remove() mishap in NodeJS).

I rebooted the Mac in Asahi Linux (I had installed it previously) after a couple of minutes (long enough for the newly freed space to be overwritten by my confused browsing, even if unlikely).

I've dabbled a bit with drat which gives a lot of information I don't know how to decode...

So before digging further, I wrote a small C program to look for known strings in the partition data. After a couple of minutes, the script dumped quite a few chunks of data, but all of them were false positives (i.e. the needles were found but it was not my code).

Given these circumstances, do I stand a chance of recovering the lost files?

Edit: I'm not holding my breath, obviously...

[jivanpal]

Is the APFS container encrypted (is/was FileVault enabled in macOS)? If so, Drat can't help you right now.

Is the drive in question an SSD, and if so, is/was TRIM enabled on the system? If so, it's possible/likely that the blocks containing your file data were trimmed away by the SSD controller some time after the files were deleted.

I'm not in a position to provide direct support with data recovery nowadays, but I am hoping to resume development of Drat within the next few weeks, hopefully focusing on a guide on how to use it effectively.

[pygy]

Thanks for your reply. This is my main machine, and the Asahi Linux install was crippled and barely functional, so I decided to accept the loss and move on.