so, on the task of saving my ass from serious loss of bitcoins, i have succeeded in shrinking my main system install so i can now duplicate the disk to a smaller drive and then i can use the big drive to dump a copy of the original disk that had the running bitcoin core on it

this is a lot more effort with a smaller chance of recovery because the disk has had a lot of data copied onto it after repartitioning but i will feel a lot better knowing i have more than one chance to get it right if the backup volume doesn't yield the cheese