So I backed everything up, rebuilt the OS and restored what I could.
What I could?
Yep.
For some reason my tar command got the first 40GB of my data, but stopped thereafter. I don’t care so much about the recoverable stuff, and I got most of the unrecoverable stuff, but a complete, organized set of photos from Greece, my entire MP3 collection and a few other things are missing.
The photos tick me off the most. I only have a copy of half of them on a drive that I originally unloaded a lot of them from and a few others on an SD card. Burning this to disk was on the to-do-list 
I’m experimenting with PhotoRec to scour my drive for jpg and mov files. Yeah, a new OS was loaded on there, but we’ll see what I can get. This thing is interesting from a forensic perspective. Awesome tool.
