Others have answered your question - but it may be worth pointing out the obvious - backups. Annoyances such as you describe are much less of a stress if you know you’re protected - not just against accidental erasure, but malicious damage and technical failure.
Some people think it’s a lot of bother to do backups, but it is very easily automated with any of the very good free tools around (backup-manager, someone’s mentioned timeshift, and about a million others). A little time spent planning decent backups now will pay you back one day in spades, it’s a genuine investment of time. And once set up, with some basic monitoring to ensure they’re working and the odd manual check once in a blue moon, you’ll never be in this position again. Linux comes ahead here in that the performance impact from automated backups can be prioritised not to impact your main usage, if the machine isn’t on all the time.