Sorry for your loss. I did something similar recently. A script was creating a “~” folder in my notes folder. I wanted to delete it… Thankfully it stopped at some file it couldn’t remove and my dotfiles are in git.

I should’ve […] used trash

For those who don’t know: trash-cli

I should’ve had that backed up

Absolutely! IT’s time to check out Stow now. With this you can easily manage your configuration and dotfiles (and all other data) in a single location.

https://venthur.de/2021-12-19-managing-dotfiles-with-stow.html

if your session is still running you can use env to help reconstruct it