Copying files to new SD card, now can't boot

I wanted to migrate my Home Assistant files on my micro sd 32 gb card in my raspberry pi 3 to a new sd card that is 8 gb. I copied the entirety of the sd card and then moved the files to the other card, but now the raspberry pi will not boot. I had made snapshots but now I am unable to access them because I can’t boot hassio. Where are the snapshots located in the files on the sd card? Please tell me I did not just lose all of my work on my home assistant, any help would be appreciated.

Did you literally copy + paste all files and not clone using a partitioning program?

Yes, in retrospect I feel like an idiot. Is there anything I can recover from these files?
hassboot

Presumably you still have the 32GB SD card?

Recuva is something I’ve used before.
https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva

I think there are limitations on the freemium version like 500 files or can’t tell the type of document?
You just need to recover the configuration.yaml and your !import files to get up and running again.

Edit
I just noticed you are showing the boot partition only.
You do know that there is nothing important* in there, right?
All your Pi configurations, settings, and HA are on another partition which is not visible to native Windows …

Yes, but I already reformatted it so I guess I’m screwed

Yeah, I understand that now, but hindsights 20/20. Would recuva even work, wouldn’t it only recognize files visible to windows?

Not necessarily. If you copied the snapshots they will be there. But what you showed in your pic is only the boot partition.

How exactly did you copy the files? Where to? You say:

Also from the instructions

A 32 GB or bigger card is recommended.

I realize now what I did was dumb. I simply opened the sd card in windows and copied all files displayed to a new sd card, and then formatted the original to use for another purpose. I’m guessing windows did not copy anything else because it could only recognize the boot partition.

Honestly, you could keep trying to recover your files by trying to recover more files from a Linux operating system, but it might not be worth your time and effort.

It sucks, but I would just move on with HA and start fresh with the 32 GB card.

I have to say this, but back up your config files at the least. They take up a couple of hundred kilobytes and they are all located in the one directory. With config backups you could have dropped them in a folder and gotten back up and running in a couple of hours!

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Well moving a snapshot off the SD card to another computer/cloud would have saved the day.

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There are many ways to do a back up and recovery, and I’m just expressing another means for the OP.

They are essentially the same thing though, and there are existing documented methods of backing up snapshots.

Cheers.

K thanks …