I want to add to this that Windows sometimes has its own ideas and decides it owns the disk. I had a dual boot with Windows and Linux and Windows updated and fucked up the file system. I was able to recover almost everything without that much issue, that it did require some extra tools and some knowledge. The boot partition I never recovered though. (I was able to fix it to get it to boot into the Linux install again, but not Windows no matter what I tried.)
This was about a year ago, maybe a bit more. The issue I had with Linux prior to this, which is why I was dual booting, was gaming. At this point gaming was perfectly fine for me to ditch windows, so I just grabbed all the files I needed to keep and set the drive up new with a fresh install.