@nc50lc

Thank you so much for the detailed reply.

To prevent any issues and hopefully have things run smoothly, I've plugged in a 1TB SSD and will just download the entire thing.

I've purged all instances/files related to Bitcoin Core - and then re installed.

I've unchecked all "purged" options, and once fully downloaded/synced.

I'm going to place the .dat directly into the folder instead of trying to restore.

Hopefully I'm following all advice correctly + will have no issues.