Scapeghost

I was born in a shitty Middle Eastern’ish country and let's just say I’m sick of it. The general toxicity, the internal racism, the unreliability of basic utilities, the misogyny, the risk of mugging and murder…

I tried living in some of the “better” Middle Eastern places like Dubai, Qatar, and frankly, behind the artificial veneer that they spend massive efforts to advertise, they are just as shitty.

I just want to be able to code and create from home in peace, and have a beautiful environment outdoors to safely take a break in. I also want my money to go towards supporting a good country with functional democracy, that offers a path to eventual citizenship.

I’m around 40 and a high-school dropout. I have passive income that hovers around $1000-$2000 every month. If I’m successful with the stuff I’m working on then it will be more. I can dip into savings for larger one-off expenses like initial moving costs or setting up a company, and I can break the piggy bank for around $30K-$35K. I can speak English as good as a native.

What are my options?

WARNING: DriveGenius/DrivePulse may be malware, it's a pain to remove it and prevent it from instantly relaunching itself, and I'm still not sure it's gone completely.

——

I just bought a new external disk and tried to transfer everything from an older disk to the new one:

• I MOVE'd folders instead of COPYing them to easily keep track of what was already copied (and to avoid Finder annoyances when trying to merge folders instead of overwriting)

• In a moment of stress, instead of deleting the volumes on the older disk (to free space on it for something else) I accidentally deleted the freshly-copied volume on the new disk! :(

So the situation is:

• APFS volume on NewDisk accidentally deleted via Disk Utility.

• APFS folders on OldDisk implicitly deleted via a Move operation in Finder (bypassing the Trash)

• Both disks are from LaCie, use a USB-C connection on both ends, formatted as APFS, and they are not SSDs.

• Neither disks have Time Machine protection.

• I have done [almost?] no write operations since the deletion as far as I am aware.

I want to recover either the NewDisk volume or the original OldDisk files.

Trying to find APFS recovery solutions seems to be a search term that many unscrupulous companies like to prey upon. So far, "Stellar Data Recovery" seems the most promising but I'm not sure if I should spend the $80 on it unless there's nothing better.

Does anybody have some experience that could help? Thanks in advance!