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…
Reading this thread makes me appreciate Macrium Reflect and my 64TB worth of redundant backup drives even more.
I might need to look into building a storage server of some kind. That is super cool.
Personally, I keep the redundant backup as cold storage to minimize loss. Three 8TB content or archival drives that are always attached via USB but not powered until needed, plus another on NAS for streaming, and two more 8TB each for double backup that are only turned on when I want to do a sync. So the drives get minimal wear, and whenever a primary dies, the backups get promoted and a new one is bought to be third in line. I have lost too much data in the past. As well as I can manage, never ever again.
What is kind of funny is that my computer has the SSD for system and home, and I only ever used the storage to copy over files from my home. I also have a little 1TB SSD That I could have used as an offline backup… but didn’t do that. I had the tools, just never thought to do it. I will look into a NAS, that would be nifty. Can’t bork that with a new install.
It only takes a few tragic events before “backup frequently, often and offline” really takes hold and doing preemptive backup becomes a neurosis. You have to experience a certain amount of fear, loss and regret to get there.
edit: the upside is I haven’t reinstalled a primary OS in years. Something is fucked? Restore that last image and keep rolling.
Yes. I think I am closer to data paranoia… I need a system.
That sounds nice. Not having a system that becomes terminally broken after a bad decision.
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I think I have done that a couple of times intentionally. Seems like one of those cognitive dangers that is harmful because you know it.
I once nuked a 6TB drive full of Steam games. Started a full format of the drive. Didn’t realize until it was too late.
Wow. If I could teleport you some cake I would invite you to take it. That is a lot. I cannot imagine how long it took to redownload.
Oof. I mean… yes. Oof.
Those aren’t fuckups they are learning experiences. Now you know what that does in that situation.
Yes! I am becoming more careful. I am definitely getting deeper in my knowledge of programs and linux. The stuff to learn is immense. But, it makes my life so much better.
Correct. We are used to look at computers like if they’re tools. Actually they’re environments.
I look at mine like they’re toys lol
I put my home directory on another partition, because I heard very early on that it can better facilitate distro hopping. That is not the stupid part, that’s actually good advice.
The stupid part was assuming that Linux users are identified by name, and that as long as I create a user with the same name as the one on my previous install, things would Just Work.
Im reality, Linux users are integer IDs under the hood. And in my original system, my current user at the time was not the first user I had created on that system. Thus, when I set up my new OS, mounted the home partition, and set the first user to have the same name, I was immediately unable to log in. The name match meant I was trying to read my home dir, but the UID mismatch was telling me I had no permission to read it. I was feeling ballsy with the install and elected to not enable the root user, so I had an effectively bricked OS right out of the box.
I’m sure there was some voodoo I could have done to recover it on that attempt, but I just said screw it and reinstalled.
All you really would’ve need to do is update the ownership via root user, which you can actually do from the installer. Kinda funny cause you already went through the process of mounting and running the installer, so you were already there.
There is a way to recover it. You can use a root shell aka recovery shell (usually available through your GRUB menu) to change the permissions on your home directory. But just reinstalling was probably easier anyway.
The first dumb thing is distro hopping to start with.
Distro are not that different in practice, just pick one and go on with your life.
You are right. I was happy with linux mint, and before that MX Linux. This is all just bike shedding. I spend a lot of time setting things up Hell, I spend too much time just downloading crap because I have not bothered to make a script that would automate installation of the apps I use.
Yeah, I think I will.
Debian based, arch based, rhel based are all somewhat different and have different package managers (with flatpak, appimage and snap that might be less important nowadays though)
Nobara comes with all the stuff for gaming, not everyone who uses Linux knows exactly what they need to install themselves
NixOS is fantastic and drastically different from all the others
NixOS, silverblue, vanilla are all immutable which makes a massive difference
Also not everyone wants to install their own DE, so if they want something like cinnamon, pantheon, KDE they need a distro that comes with it preinstalled
Make a donation to the testdisk author!
I will! These programs are amazing.
dd’ed an ISO onto the system drive instead of a USB stick. Luckily, the first partition was the Windows one, so not too important; and the rest I recovered from the GPT backup table.
Nice! I need to learn recovery methods. I am so used to scorch earthing an install when it goes wrong, which is not useful.
Nothing special, I just kept distrohopping and backing up my home folder to a seperate drive each time via rsync. Eventually I messed that up somewhere, some data was lost. I think that was early this year.
Nothing to major, bit of a nuisance is all. And a grim reminder that eventually you WILL mess up. It’s just a matter of time really. So try to minimize the factors that lead to mishaps like distrohopping and be diligent with your backups.Hah. That was my strategy, but manually.
I need to learn backup tools proper.
Of course, it happens when your data is at its most valuable.
I wiped my drive with a lot of non-backed-up data on it intentionally because the Fedora installer was too confusing. Lost among other things my Celeste and Minecraft saves, a lot of images, and other stuff with sentimental value.
Unless you meant to destroy all of that data, that was unintentional not intentional.
It was intentional, it was just also dumb and a bad decision
You meant to destroy your data?
Yes, I didn’t think about it a lot before doing it, that’s why it was dumb
Damn. I am sorry for that loss. I agree, I am always boggled every time I use the Fedora installer. I don’t know how I clicked the wrong disk. I didn’t read close enough, or I don’t know.
I hope the new things you make are better than what was wiped.
Tbh I don’t even remember much of the stuff that I lost anymore. I had a lot of images, a legally downloaded series, a good amount of legally downloaded music that I keep forgetting I don’t have on my phone, the aforementioned game saves, and I don’t remember more rn. I was luckily more creative during school so the more important stuff (Siberian sniper crocodile) was on another device.
Lucky me most of the important stuff are things I have on another computer, or can redownload from email or whatever service that needed it.
But my new passwords… oh well. Recovery is typically easy.
What sucks is losing things you did not know you would need or miss until much later.
I remember shortly after college I was living with a couple of people and one day we all heard “NOOOOOOOOOO!” and went running to see what tragedy happened. He had started formatting the one porn drive he had been collecting on over the last few years.
That is is a special kind grieving.
I’ll never forget that scream, I thought a sound like that was reserved for when the cat ran behind the couch and stepped on the surge protector button, corrupting the hard drive as you were almost finished writing your graduate thesis, which wasn’t backed up yet.
Honestly a thesis is way higher stakes and value. Yeah, imagine thinking there was an emergency only to find out your roommate will need to spend the rest of the semester using their imagination.
Yeah, we definitely had fun at his expense for a while after that.
I would be mortified. He seems shameless though, hah.
He was in community theater. What shame?
Ah. I was in theater tech. No shame to find anywhere.
Before you perform another task on that hard drive, try photorec. You might be able to get a majority of your files back if they’re important
I guess I can try it, since I did not like, wipe everything.
Accidentally flashed a live image (PCBSD, IIRC) onto my 1TB external HDD instead of the thumb drive. Lost years of collected music and movies that night. I learned two things:
- Don’t do this sort of thing in the middle of the night, when you’re tired and should be sleeping.
ddis nicknamed ‘disk destroyer’ for good reason.
😵💫 the 3am tinkering, it calls to me 😵💫
Fortunately my laptop only has nvmes built in, so 99% of the time all 3am me has to do is not type nvme and I’m good
When using dd, check the command before pressing enter, then check it again for good measure.
then replace dd with cat or cp.
Late to the party but this why I like Ventoy. It only looks for removable drives and then all you do is drag and drop your live images onto the removable drive. Pretty hard to mess anything up.
… no use in dd to write an image to disk. Just use cat/cp/pv…
dd is a scalpell, not a shovel.
- Disconnect all other drives
Oh, am I talking to myself? Hah.
Yeah, I wish I had all the stuff I torrented in high school. Lost treasure.
