I just discovered something I did so idiotic I need a stronger adjective that what is in my name.
For one of my installs, I accidentally overwrote my 1TB HDD. A few minutes ago I wanted to put back some files… and all I saw was a distro.
It confused me because I was not sure if I was on my solid state drive or the HDD.
So, those files are gone. A lot is gone. Nothing too precious, I think… It might be a tremendous fuck up.
See kids, this is why you back up. Off the computer. Oh well.
EDIT: Recovering files using Photorec. Everyone who recommended this to me is a hero. Also a hero is the person who recommended FTK, but I was too eager to use something now than to sign up to download. I still should though…
I got started in Linux about 15 years ago. I’m not skilled nor a techie but knowledgeable enough to make things work. After running endless cracked windows machines I switched to Linux and started distro hopping. But I didn’t have enough money at the time to afford a lot of hard drive space.
I remember going from one distro to another while trying to transfer a couple of GBs worth of work on the same drive. Two GB of data was a big deal to me at the time. At one point late one night after about the tenth distro attempt, I wiped an entire drive worth of my unbacked up work. Worst moment of digital loss I ever had.
I’ve kept double triple and quadruple backups since then … and I still worry about losing data.
That is haunting.
I tend to be pretty cavalier with my data, because only recently have I started amassing anything of value (starting to be the adult I needed to be 10 years ago).
Yes… I have some storage shopping to do.
It was waaay past midnight when I made my mistake. I should have been sleeping at least 3 hours before.