So, I'm not sure if the process has changed in the last decade or so but in a long-ago computer forensics class step 0, before all else, was to never operate data recovery on the original disk. Create a block level image of the entire device, then work on that.
My go to steps for recovery have been the following in the years since:
- create an image of the entire disk (not a partition) using ddrescue
ddrescue -d /dev/sdX <path_to_image>.img
- Run test disk on it selecting the partitions as necessary
testdisk <path_to_image>.img
If the disk has a complicated partition layout, or more effort is required to find the correct partition you can also mount parts of the disk.
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create an image of the entire disk (not a partition) using ddrescue
ddrescue -d /dev/sdX <path_to_image>.img
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Mount the image as a loopback device with the appropriate offset
losetup --offset <some_offset_like_8192> --show -v -r -f -P <path_to_image>.img
this will mount individual partitions:loop58 7:58 0 465.8G 1 loop ├─loop58p1 259:7 0 1.5G 1 part ├─loop58p2 259:8 0 450.6G 1 part └─loop58p3 259:9 0 13.7G 1 part
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Then operate testdisk on whatever partition you want.
All that said there are a lot of variables here and things don't always work perfectly. I hope you do find a way to recover them.
If you want to monitor sleep with it charging at night isn't possible, and remembering to charge every single day during the day is annoying in my opinion. Not everyone wants sleep monitoring though, or likes to sleep with a watch on, so I get why there's some division on the subject.
My pebble 2 hr lasts about 5 days and I'm very happy with that frequency of charging. I think it was a bit better when new but that was a long time ago.