Recovering a MySQL environment after a systems crash and OS reinstall

[Cecil Carpenter]

My environment is Ubuntu 2022.04.2 and MySQL 8.0.33. I also have MySQL Workbench 8.0.33. I have an i7-10700K processor and 16GB of memory.

When my system crashed and became unrecoverable, I used a Live USB stick to reinstall Ubuntu. However, I had weekly backups of the system in Timeshift. What I planned to do was as follows:
1. Install all the software that did not come with the Live USB;
2. For every application, isolate the backed up files that had to do with the operational aspects of the application;
3. Replace any of the above that were created by the new install with the backed up version. I did this in each case by renaming the new files with .new appended so I would not lose anything until I knew everything was working properly;
4. When I was sure the application was functioning as it should, I moved all the .new files to a directory where the directory name was the New-Install-... For example, for Thunderbird, the directory was New-Install-Thunderbird. All these directories were under one directory named New-Install.

Things went fine until I got to MySQL. I believe my problem is that I do not know all the files/directories that need to be moved over. Any suggestions that I can use to get this resolved? As of now, I have MySQL installed, but I cannot log in nor do I have a root user. So I can't access anything through Workbench or through the terminal. All suggestions will be deeply appreciated.