I swear by ddrescue. It’s a situation I strive to never be but i’ve been there before. I used it once to rescue an employees masters capstone project from their dead work laptop.

Look into using GNU stow! It’s exactly what you’re doing but it creates the symlinks for you.

I love this solution, I’ve been using it for years. I had previously just been using the home directory is a git repo approach, and it never quite felt natural to me and came with quite a few annoyances. Adding stow to the mix was exactly what I needed.