This is shop talk; you can skip this post.
The new laptop was doing something inappropriate, so I tried to recover my Win11 installation from backup just so I could see if the problem persisted. The warranty would not be honored running Linux. Turns out Win11 doesn’t have the drivers to read my SSD, and decided to install the OS on an attached USB drive. That happened to be the drive containing all my archives, files, photos, etc. from the past 10+ years.
I gave up and reinstalled Mint Linux (it found the SSD easily). Nicely enough, the original inappropriate behavior went away. Apparently the last Mint OS upgrade borked something and a fresh install solved it. But all I had were some recent backups online and the most important files, but all of my drop-in configurations were gone, of course. It took a couple of days to go back and reconstruct everything I had done over the years.
It was a good time to examine all my built-up habits from years of use. For example, I ditched Thunderbird for Evolution mail client, because the latter works with Gmail and Outlook, and imports all the calendars and address books. For stuff which requires MS Office, I just use the online version. For my own use, I’ll stick with LibreOffice.
Also, I found a place that sells and ships tractor feed paper for my new printer, and more cheaply than everyone else. I’ve also found a Linux driver that works okay with the Epson LQ-590ii — it’s the Epson generic driver. Turns out the printer understands generic ESC/P2 commands just fine. The only thing I still cannot do is identify software that will send formatted print jobs that use the built-in native fonts on the printer. I really do like the results, but neither Linux nor Windows has any software that will do that, so far as I know. Some years ago, the predecessor of LibreOffice would do that, but that feature died a while back.
At any rate, it’s all working again.
Wait, so did your archived files get overwritten permanently with the OS, or did you recover it?
Gone. No sign of them.