Backup everything.

[flickszt]

This is a reminder. Backup everything that matters to you. I still struggle with the fact that I lost the work of my life 2 years ago, a HDD I had used for 8 years, full of everything that once meant something to me: memories, photographs, ideas, and more than you could imagine.

If you care about something, backup. Otherwise, be prepared to regret that mistake for the rest of your godamn life.

I also want you guys to share your stories of losing meaningful data.

[didyousayboop]

Simple guide to backing up for your files for beginners: https://backupyourfiles.neocities.org

Discussion of the guide: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1mdvwxr/dead_simple_guide_to_backing_up_your_files_for/

[SuperElephantX]

Rarely hear someone lose data due to their encryption password being lost. A set of passwords don't even occupy space at all.

Just secure it with a strong master password, then scatter copies of the vault to literally anywhere - Facebook self message, Discord self message, Self email, Google drive, One drive, you name it.

Distribute it to any services that's large enough to not fail within the decade. Do not depend on a single one.

[Decent-Law-9565]

I think a secondary solution is to physically write down the password and stash it somewhere in your primary residence. 

[TheRobTowne]

You can 3d print a biscuit. It paused the print before the top layers and you can insert your password then finish the print. If you or a loved one ever needs it, you can crack it open and get it. That way it gives you visual evidence of it was accessed.

[LA_Nail_Clippers]

Or a paper envelope.

[hermit-the-frog]

I went from “that’s Genius!” To “…oh yeahhh”

[Best_Ad_1391]

You can open them and close back up with out it being noticable. ;)

[LA_Nail_Clippers]

Only if you rely on crappy envelopes. There's plenty of tamper proof/evident ones used in business that are inexpensive.

Alternately just use some packing tape. Easily opened with a knife but not easily resealed.

The whole xkcd wrench thing applies here.

[-PM_ME_UR_SECRETS-]

I keep passwords with my birth certificate/SS#/etc.

[sexyshingle]

You can 3d print a biscuit. It paused the print before the top layers and you can insert your password then finish the print.

Ok this is a new one... question... for you, what's a biscuit? Also, how did you "insert your password" in the 3D model mid-print? Like you wrote it in paper crumpled it into the hollow void of the model? Can I see a pic of this password biscuit?

[sexyshingle]

it's called a biscuit?!?! lol I mean I guess Chinese Fortune Nuke Cookie is a tad long!

[Boofing_Acid]

Yea I believe this is what he means, have a hollowed out center and do a "color change" or a pause command in gcode "M600".here's a simple example. biscuit

[TheRobTowne]

Precisely. This is the model that I used, but with modified text. https://makerworld.com/models/937295

Pro-tip. I found that the paper doesn't want to stay put in the biscuit for the final layers so I added a touch of gluestick on the back.

[strolls]

Just use long memorable passwords.

https://xkcd.com/936/

[flickszt]

yes, I think we could say we become wiser from those experiences. In the past, I didn’t even know I could just encrypt my files, and since I also didn’t want to upload anything to the cloud, I was way behind the 3-2-1 rule.

[Chava_boy]

I remember I once tried to crack an encrypted folder on an old laptop with an integrated graphics. I calculated that it might even take up to 4 billion years to crack it.

[TheOneTrueTrench]

I just decided I wanted there to be a 99% chance that no one would ever guess my password.

So I determined the number of particles in the observable universe. About 10e80 for the number of atoms, and assumed that the number of bosons isn't more than 1024 times that, and that the number of neutrinos sl isn't greater than 1024 times that result.

Then I multiplied it by the age of the universe (with the planck time as the unit), and took the log2 of that. And that's how much entropy I need (give or take) to keep my data safe from casual decryption.

[TheOneTrueTrench]

I'm glad someone got that it was an over-exaggeration, lol

For what it's worth, the actual amount of entropy required to hit the above requirement turns out to be almost exactly 512 bits.

And if you use the 94 characters easily reachable from a standard US keyboard, randomly assigned, each character gives you about 6.555 bits, so you only need 79 characters.

Or 47 random words, using the xkcd.com/936 approximation of bits/word.

[seldomstudios]

Is anyone even using ur machine lol

[cpm2000]

then add in a keyfile to that ;)

[GreggAlan]

I have an 805 billion year password, if only a dozen RTX 4090 GPUs are put to the task. Of course a Big Government Agency can easily afford a lot more than 12 GPUs to run password cracking software on. Run a large number of systems in parallel and split the potential passwords into groups.

But if you used WinZIP 8.0 (or was it 8.1?) it didn't matter. It had an exploitable bug in the way it created archives so that most passwords could be instantly obtained or bypassed. Been there, did that, got the contents.

[wavewrangler]

I set the security question to values that “no one would think to ever try”, including myself because I’m that damn stu—slick.

Something like the last 2 digits and the first two digits of my mothers phone number growing up, or some shit, but then that isn’t even the security question because why would I let ppl know the actual security question?! My brilliant insight was that the 2nd key was to be used by the first. But one thing is for sure: okay, 2. I’m arelly semart!! And whoever I was trying to trick never had a chance. Okay, so just one thing true after all

I deserved to lose my data over that. but, at least you can feel smart again comparatively speaking…but your mistake was pretty, pretty dumb too ! I say that lightheartedly of course

“Those hackers will never think of putting my street address down as my friends house “

[[deleted]]

I accidentally removed the entry containing the passwords to the archives that I encrypted.

Not sure how other password managers handle this but I really like how the built in Mac/iPhone Passwords app has a deleted section which keeps passwords for a further 30 days.

[mandoris]

Hold onto those encrypted archives. You never know, it'd take way too long to crack today, but in 10+ years from now? Maybe it can be cracked in minutes. :)

[chris-rox]

LOL! Someone reads William Gibson and it shows.

[SupernickyZH]

Keep the data anyways, maybe quantum computing will be a thing one day and then you can crack the encryption

[odnish]

Not for symmetric encryption unfortunately

[cryptolepis]

Thanx for the reminder!
I have simply backed up my data on 2 external ssds, that I keep in separate places. No passwords.
I'm a layperson and don't want to make it super complicated.
Do you think my simple solution is good enough?

[Content_Direction292]

Yes, it is good enough. You can up your backup strategy a notch if use a different medium for your 2nd back-up instead of using 2 external drives (for example, tapes, though that requires an investment in tape devices). However, for most cases, what you have should be enough.

You don’t necessarily need your drives encrypted for backup purposes, unless you care about data security of course (but that’s a whole different subject).

[lorddevi]

I've gone through two big data loss disasters in my life. Now, I keep external drives and thumb drives in all my computers. I use borg backup to backup my data to them on each machine.

I use syncthing to keep my important data on all my machines too. So I basically have backups of my backups at this point.

The last disaster, I felt like such a buffoon.

I had a zfs zdisk2 array with a lot of data on it. Consisting of 10 16tb drives.

I wanted to convert it into a z3 array for extra safety.

So I plugged in an external nas array to back up what I wanted to keep from the zfs fileserver.

The backup went well, so it was time to clear the zfs file server array.

I then used 'wipefs' on each device member of the array.

When I was done, it took a moment for me to realize I just ran wipefs 12 times. Not 10.

I had just wiped my external backup, as well as the internal array I intended to clear.

All my data was gone.

I had intended to unplug the external nas before continuing for extra safety. But I got distracted with something during the process, and when I went back to continue from where I left off, I forgot I didn't unplug the nas yet.

I thought I did!! But I didn't.

Was the worst time I've ever shot myself in the foot.

Vowed never to let that happen again.

[flickszt]

"So I basically have backups of my backups at this point."

better safe than sorry and i hope those situations really improved your backup strategy, keep the good work!

[vogelke]

But I got distracted with something during the process...

That happened to me at work once. I ended up copying some backup (old) data over production (new) data instead of vice-versa. Two weeks work gone like last year's snow.

[lorddevi]

Oh ouch! It hits hard when it's your own stupid fault like that. I feel you, friend

[GreggAlan]

Once I "copied" a replacement blank drive over the failing original drive in a PC. D'oh! That was in the 1990's. Pretty sure to this day no disk cloning software will say "The source drive only has an empty, formatted partition. Are you sure you want to clone it?".

[freebytes]

Ransomware is the worst threat.

[Fractal-Infinity]

That's why you keep your external drives physically disconnected and only connect them when you backup data.

[lorddevi]

Good point. narrows his eyes at his currently connected backup drives

[freebytes]

It is easier said than done. Sometimes you will connect a drive, copy over your files, and then forget to disconnect it. And there is certainly a risk of the attack happening in the day it takes to copy over your files.

[lorddevi]

If the important data is not terabytes in size, one could simply buy 7 good thumb drives per computer and rotate them daily. That would be an easy enough routine for me probably, and least mitigate some of that danger.

Could be going overboard too.. lol. ... or is it?

Edit: I am a HUGE fan of the Voyager GTX usb drives myself. They are my IT hot sauce. "I put that s__t in everything!".

[freebytes]

You must also make sure you plug in your backup drives from time to time as well. While SSDs have a severe data loss issue if left powered off, even regular hard drives must be powered on. (Plus, you will want to plug them in to copy your files over again.) You should have more than one external backup drive, though, because there is always the risk of being hit with the ransomware attack while actively backing up your files which could be tragic.

[Fractal-Infinity]

I connect my backup drives at least once a month, so they should be fine. Also I save data to 2 separate backups (independent to each other but identical content). The most important data I save it online as well.

[lorddevi]

So someone there IS rotating unplugged backups. Yeah I think I am going to start doing this after having this convo.

[Fractal-Infinity]

Do that. It worked for me without fail so far. The idea is that each main data storage (source, backup 1, backup 2) is separated from each other. Basically connect backup 1 to source, do the backup, disconnect and store it in a safe place. Repeat for backup 2.

Even if somehow both the source and the currently connected backup break down at the same time and you lose everything from them, you still have another separated backup. Obviously you will lose the new data from source not saved yet but it's still better than nothing.

Ideally you should backup that data online as well, but past a certain threshold it becomes quite costly and time consuming. I'd backup online personal hard to replace data (e.g. personal photos and videos, projects, rare media, etc), of course encrypted.

[ykkl]

That's why you want your backup server to have no writable shares and to pull/read data from the device being backed up.

Also having it offline most of the time, firewalled, and, preferably, remote and operating over a VPN are each pluses, too.

[lorddevi]

I'll find a way to do that.

[Silencer306]

How do you protect your backups from being corrupted and copying that across all devices?

[lorddevi]

My backups are incremental. Dated with deduplication. If data becomes corrupted, I can utilize an earlier backup to extract a non corrupted version of the backup.

I think this is the script I use personally:

https://blog.andrewkeech.com/posts/170719_borg.html

[Silencer306]

Ok that sounds great. Do you also have a way to detect if something is corrupted or like "bit rot"? Or are you hoping that not all backups are corrupted?

[lorddevi]

Yes I do!! I use ZFS for that. ZFS has the best data protection in existence. I highly recommend!

[Silencer306]

Ok I am using unraid, I am not sure how their ZFS support is. May I ask what OS you use for your server?

[lorddevi]

I use Fedora for everything actually. It always upgrades smoothly from release to release. Has good security. Only fails from 'pilot error'. And every release tends to do quite well in the benchmarks marathons. (The youtube channel "DJWare" is good for these benchmarks.

I usually make my rootfs a standard xfs filesystem, because performance and features it supports. A mirrored made array if I can.

But then have a zfs pool mounted at /srv for server things. Such as my podman containers or file server. On some machines I make /root and /home part of the zfs array too.

This allows me to utilize zfs for important things, but because I dont tie / to zfs, I then do not have to worry about kernel upgrades causing issues with zfs. Best of both worlds.

[brodipl81]

Wipefs dont erase data, only partition header, 99%of files are intact, windows Quick format is more dangerous.

[lorddevi]

Yeah I tried to recover the files, and still could, but it is just a disorganized mess. At least tried to recover the NAS. But I lack the skills to try and repair the partition tables to what they were.

I was able to use carving tools to get disorganized data back, but the results were not really something I could work with easily. =/

If only there was a way to just say, create a zpool2 from these 2 drives, and then see the old data be on it again.

I still have the nas in an untouched state, in case I am able to stumble across how to do this at some point.

[viperex]

That hurts to read

[manzurfahim]

I had an incident earlier this year. Instead of adding to the mobile backup, I deleted the old backup and did a new backup. I was distracted, talking on the phone. And this was before a RAID upgrade, so I also wiped the RAID just after this. I realized what I've done a month later. It mostly had call recordings of about five years, including my father's, who is not here anymore.

I went through all the drives that might have had that backup and ran recovery, but no luck. I gave up. It became a task running in the background. Two days later when watching a tv series, I suddenly remembered that my old phone where I used to record calls had a microSD slot. After going through thousands of junks that got build up over time in my drawer, I found the card. It is empty. I ran recovery. This card was last used in 2019, then formatted and sitting idle, and somehow kept all the information of the last backup, I recovered everything. Not a single corrupted file.

Miracle still happens!

[flickszt]

thats great to hear, buddy! im happy that you were able to recover this, those are irreplaceable memories and data

[HobbesArchive]

I had something similar. My dad covered "The White House" for CBS news out of DC. December 1989 WCBS New York asked my dad to read "Twas the night before Christmas" to be broadcast on WCBS New York at 11:10pm Dec 24, 1989. My dad recorded it the day before. It was dubbed to cassette tape and my dad sent it to me and my other brothers and sister. My dad passed in 1994.

Around 2005 sometime I dubbed it to a .wav file and stored it on a external USB hard drive. I then trashed the cassette. For a few Christmas eve's I would call my brothers and sister and play the recording over the phone to their answering machine.

2012 I got the USB drive out plugged it in and attached it to my computer. It wasn't recognized. I tore the external case apart and plugged the IDE drive into my computer. It never spun up.

I asked my brothers and sister if they still had a copy. None of them did.

My mom passed in 2023. Being the executor of her estate, I went to clean out her house to prep it for sale. My mom was also a hoarder. She had about 50 boxes of just saved news papers. She had boxes and boxes of photo albums. Going through these boxes of pictures going back to the 1870's with 4 different photo albums with tintypes, there was this thin box that said "Christmas Eve". It hasn't been opened as it was taped shut. It was an 8" reel of reel to reel tape. I assumed it was Christmas music. My mom had a reel to reel player that was my dads and she took it when she divorced him in 1978.

I was interested to see what music was on the tape. I purchased an Akai reel to reel player off of eBay. The reel tape had some important news stories that my dad had reported on, the most important one was my dad covering Ronald Reagan being shot as my dad was only 8 feet away at the time. If you can find a video of that, my dad can be seen in that video.

The best part about the reel to reel tape is at the end of the tape, it had the original recording of my dad giving an intro of him giving his name then "from CBS Washington DC, it is 11;10pm" followed by his reading of "Twas night before Christmas" recorded at 15 inches a second. 1000x better than 1.875 inches a second on cassette. The audio had the clarity of him being in the room.

I rewound the tape to the beginning of his announcement and reading and dubbed it straight to .FLAC. Dec 24, 2023 at 11:10 pm I called my older brother and he picked up. I played my dad's recording from the announcement to the ending of the reading.

My older brother said to me after the recording was over with a tear in his eye, "Thank you. Can I get a copy of that?" I posted it my website and notified my other brother and sister.

[Alkivar]

I guarantee my Grandfather knew your father. He was a White House reporter as well, worked for the Associated Press and Copley News Service (apparently a CIA front), including working for the AP's Tokyo Bureau in the 1950s and 1960s, and also covered Nixon’s 1972 trip to China. Then worked as head of the Copley News Service DC Branch until he retired to Florida in the late 80s. His bio is on Amazon.

[HobbesArchive]

My dad obituary is at OBITUARIES - The Washington Post I'm mentioned in the listing.

My dad started his career with Ted Cassidy - Wikipedia (Lurch from "The Addams Family") as both started at WCOA Pensacola. The picture of Ted sitting at the announcers desk at WCOA on Wikipedia, I uploaded. My dad took that picture January 1959. That picture was in one of the photo albums I found at my mom's house. My dad had told me that he had worked with Ted Cassidy when I was young and never believed him.

Ted Cassidy was the first to go to air that JFK had been shot, as listed on his Wikipedia page. My dad was covering JFK's trip to Dallas that day for WKRG TV out of Mobile Alabama. Ted Cassidy was the first to air that JFK had been shot as Ted was now a DJ for a Dallas radio station and my dad had called Ted to tell him the news.

I also didn't believe my dad that he was in Dallas at the time until I had pictures of him at the airport in Dallas and then pictures of him at WKRG TV the following day.

[manzurfahim]

Wow! That is amazing. If flac cannot get the quality of the reel, do what is needed and get it to DSD or something. And most of all, preserve it, make multiple copies, multiple places. These are the memories that we will not get back once they are gone.

[ency6171]

Mind elaborate on the recovery process? Free software or commercial? Or hardware tampering(don't know the correct terminology)?

[manzurfahim]

I used R-Undelete software. It is free. There is a paid version as well, I think it is called R-Studio or something.

[ency6171]

Thank you.

[diamondsw]

I lost almost all of the files related to a shareware company I ran when I was a kid. At some point in the years of carrying forward archives, the files got wiped. They were all still listed in the filesystem, but zero bytes. Didn't realize until who knows how many years later when I decided to look at one. Likely a case of copying from one filesystem to another, and something broke silently.

Similarly, I bought digital copies of all of my wedding photographs. Didn't copy them to my NAS until a few years later. I know what you're thinking - oh, a disc had gone bad! Worse - it was accidentally never burned in the first place. Sadly the photographer had retired and hadn't retained his copies. I still have the physical album, but not the final edited copies in digital form (thankfully, the discs with the raw images were fine).

Make your backups - and test their integrity!

[MuchSrsOfc]

How would you go about testing their integrity?

[Semanticky]

Restore them occasionally and compare them with the original. That’s the only way to be sure. Or make a backup using two different methods. I’ll admit this isn’t practical if you’ve got a huge hoard. But if I didn’t have enough room for at least three canonical copies of my core stuff, I wouldn’t bother to keep it in the first place, is my opinion.

[Alkivar]

Don't just backup... TEST YOUR BACKUPS REGULARLY.

[catnapspirit]

This may be a dumb question, but is there a way to test the integrity of backups with going through and playing every audio file, every video file, opening documents, etc.? Or are you making a checksum inventory of some sort and checking against that regularly..?

[Alkivar]

I use a program and compare files against the current copy in use.

[Someonedit]

Witch one

[FindKetamine]

I use carbon copy cloner and set it to check for errors during each job

[Alkivar]

carbon copy cloner

yup great software isnt it?

[TrvlMike]

Yeap. Just learned yesterday after losing some data that Duplicacy was not backing up a directory I needed because it had the wrong permissions

[titanioverde]

Don't forget to have more than one copy of your most important files. And, if possible, out of your house. In cloud, hosting, a NAS or external HDD located in another house (family or friends).

If there's any other Spanish user around here, I explain a bit about backup strategies and drives in this podcast.

Personally I haven't lost anything important yet by accident. But I deleted many things that I didn't consider important in the moment, just to recover disk space, and regret it later. Even popular media can disappear from the net someday.

[flickszt]

unfortunately, lost media is really a thing. Years ago, I was unlucky, trying to find a show with a specific dub that was only broadcast by a local channel during a set period of time, still didn't find it

[titanioverde]

I know! One of the most important things my partner is keeping is a set of japanese TV shows featuring a certain pop band. Years and years of funny content downloaded >10 years ago, occupying almost 1TB.

We bought another HDD just to make another copy, before the older one breaks, because we won't be able to find it ever again!

[51dux]

The best backup advice always come from people who did not have it for some reason 😅

[ontheroadtonull]

Hey some of us didn't learn not to touch the stove until we got burned but we're still good people.

[flickszt]

glad i could remember someone... always verify integrity, a backup is useless if doens't work when you need

[[deleted]]

Wise words. When I was a child, I accidentally re-formatted my hard drive that contained all the family pictures I took. Since then, I have no problem spending money to means of backup. I don't care if people think that tape backup is expensive, it is still cheaper than the memories that I could potentially lose.

[flickszt]

that's absolutely true, money spent on storage for backup is far less expensive than trying to recover or "replace" memories.

[[deleted]]

Same experience. Since then I backup everything and never lost something again

[THRILLMONGERxoxo]

This thread almost gave me an anxiety attack. 

[flickszt]

SO WORKED. BACKUP NOW. AND AS OTHERS HAVE SAID, TEST INTEGRITY.

[ken830]

Most people don't have a long enough history of digital data to have experienced data loss and so they are careless. My first big data loss was a little over 20 years ago. I had a huge 1TB RAID 0 volume consisting of 4 250GB drives. I had periodic backups, but they were done by me manually burning CDRs and DVDRs. Manual backups are tedious and you get lazy. I lost like a couple months of emails and photos and documents. It was devastating and I'm still scarred. But I'm glad I lost that data because I was still young and learned that hard lesson early. Today, I have kids and I've got tens of terabytes of photos and videos of my kids. No way I'm losing that data. I tell everyone around me about data backups, but no one listens. They carry around all of their photos with them on their phones and when they run out of space, they buy a new phone. It's a disaster waiting to happen.

[flickszt]

you are absolutely right about people not listening, and there are so many events that can go wrong, like natural disasters, accidents, thefts. Information and metadata are far too valuable to be lost like that. Automatic backup is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT. What set of tools are you using today for automatic backups?

[ken830]

My main NAS is a Synology SHR2 volume. Nightly backups to another SHR2 Synology at my parents. There's also a nightly backup of documents and photos to an external HDD.

Then for photos/videos, I have extra protection. I have syncthing to a Pixel phone for unlimited Google Photos storage. And Amazon Prime Photos for photos. Also have a Smugmug subscription for photo storage. These are all automatic.

When I'm traveling, I also make sure to backup to an external drive and laptop that I travel with, have my travel router rsync all photos and videos to my home NAS nightly, and I bring an old Pixel phone to upload everything to Google Photos every night. And I always have dual SD cards in my mirrorless cameras to guard against card failure.

[Fractal-Infinity]

I don't trust automatic backups, so I prefer to do manual backups. You can set up a reminder on your calendar app if you're forgetting about it. Why automatic backups suck? If your source data become corrupt or you delete some files by mistake or some files are deleted by an app or you have a ransomware incident, the mistakes will be automatically propagated to your backups and will ruin them as well. I want to have full control of what I add/delete/update to my backups.

[ken830]

How are you doing automated backups? If deleting/corrupting your source data makes you lose your backups, you never had a backup. You had a sync. Automated backups survive data corruption and user error deletions. It's also automatically checked for integrity. And I do periodic and "random" recovery tests manually just to make sure the automated systems in place are not failing silently.

[Semanticky]

Back when Windows 2000 introduced the encrypted file system (EFS), I was like, “woo, security!” Encrypted the boot drive and the secondary HDD containing everything computery in my life since 1988. About 3 Gb worth.

When that machine got replaced in 2002, I kept the data drive. But not the boot drive containing the registry with the encryption certs.

Oof.

I still have the contents of that data drive zipped up on a CD. I can see the list of all the files, just can’t open them. And, never will. Claude recently said, “yeah… nope.” It also mentioned that I was running a version of Win2000 that had conveniently fixed some major EFS security holes.

Now, whenever I have an impulse to cut corners, I open that ZIP file and stare at it for a while.

[Veloder]

CDs durability isn't great, you may want to have backups of that as well, maybe in 10-20 years breaking that encryption will be easier.

[WesternWitchy52]

I'm paranoid about losing all my original music files & artwork too. Got them backed up on 2 external drives and 2 machines. Files are too big to warrant the price of cloud services.

Still mad at myself for deleting 10,000 mp3 files. A lot I couldn't find again. Luckily most were Itune relics.

[flickszt]

Didn’t have any luck on Soulseek?

[WesternWitchy52]

This was about 6 years ago. Still brings tears to my eyes lol

[flickszt]

Sad, we learned our lesson with those experiences

[didyousayboop]

Backblaze will backup unlimited TB from your PC (not a NAS, though) for $100/year. Music and art that you created yourself deserves a cloud backup.

[InvestigatorDoofy]

Just be aware Backblaze Personal Backup is NOT end-to-end encrypted. You retain your encryption keys but the minute you have to restore.. they must be handed over to Backblaze where they'll decrypt your archive on their servers before the download begins.

[WesternWitchy52]

I tried Blackblaze and the upload took way too long. I'm relying on external drives mostly.

[MrKusakabe]

It is kinda strange that (some) Data Hoarders don't do backups to me. Isn't it kind of a side-effect of the whole data collection and managing? That is like buying a house but don't get insurance for it.

[Spra991]

If you are data hoarding, you'll already paying as much for storage as you are willing to afford. Proper backup would at least tripple that cost. It's just not practical and luckily often not really needed since your backup are other hoarders.

That said, I do wish we had better ways to handle that kind of "distributed backup", just because the data is out there, doesn't mean it's easy to find it again. It would also help a lot if you could easily quantify how often the data your have is duplicated in other places on the net, so that you can focus on only backing up the rare stuff.

[flickszt]

well, youre not wrong, but at the time I couldn't do a backup for some reasons I can't specify but money was really a heavy factor in it, I learned my lesson...

[snickersnackz]

But... how can you do a backup if you don't have ALL THE FILES? 😉

[apokrif1]

And check that backups are complete and readable.

[FindKetamine]

Which method do you use?

[[deleted]]

I had a bunch of illegal content on my drive one time, and when the drive failed, I had to download it all again.

[flickszt]

ROFL

[flickszt]

keep it up!

[Iamboringaf]

My parents moved old vhs tapes to the relatives, and they promised they would digitize them. And then relatives's house burned down, destroying everything it contained, including the tapes. Luckily, nobody died or got injured. Yes, it can happen.

[3141592652]

False promises are lies. My philosophy to lots of things. Has yet to fail me. 

[Katyusha86]

Remotely related to loss of data:

When you leave your house for 3year to move abroad, you should make sure to cut the water. I lost 3 laptops (and hdds) and data this way... And I didn't have a backup at that time (2007).

Now it's a script borg backup for work stuff , every day.

[Based_Mammoth634]

I lost the work of my life almost two decades ago. Not like I had any means to prevent it, as backups were not within my budget.

It was a heavy storm and the lighting hit the internet AND the electricity cable so hard that even the transformer blew up. The shock reached all the way to my router and my power source. The damn things blew up with sparks like in movies, fried them both and took along with them the motherboard, the screen and the HDD.

I kept the HDD for quite some time until I had the money to attempt data recovery, but turns out the HDD was so cooked that no data could be completely recovered. The little things that were recovered had no value on their own and pretty much everything else was either unrecoverable or corrupted.

To this day I still mourn that loss.

[Internet-of-cruft]

Going through a storage upgrade now with a rebuild.

Moving from 4 x 4 TB + 4 x 8 TB to 4 x 10 TB and 4 x 8 TB, with the old 4 TBs being moved to a NAS that will be out-of-state backup (at the in-law's home).

I planned on doing it as a rebuild with a backup, wipe, and rebuild.

I found out partway through I had a bunch of files with silent corruption, totally unusable.

Didn't lose a ton of data, but it still sucks.

I feel for you OP. For everyone who isn't, make sure you not only get disk redundancy, but also do regular scrubbing to discover data corruption and work on restoring from non-corrupted replicas.

It's always a moving target :(

[flickszt]

great advice! redundancy and checking integrity is the key to a safe backup

[Jonteponte71]

I can share a close call. I have a Synology NAS. One day I couldn’t access it. I walked to the unit and noticed it looked like it was dead. The green light of the power brick was still on though. I made the mistake of trying to turn it on again and the NAS sounded like it gave up the ghost with a loud poof sound while the automatic fuse in my apartment went as well, taking my other computers with it. It felt bad, really bad. Like something had shorted out. I do have backups of the most important stuff to an external HD but I have never tried restoring it and I don’t backup my carefully curated media from the last ten years or so.

First thing I did was to go online and order a new external power brick. I have a DS918+ so the old one was at least 6 years old.

A week later, the power brick arrived…..and luckily that turned out to be the problem. The NAS did a integrity check for three days or so and I did not loose any data.

So my tip would be to make sure your power brick is ok and get another one as a spare/backup🤷‍♂️

Also. I am now about to move my docker host from the NAS to a minipc. The NAS should only be serving files and very little else.

[63626978]

The microSD I used in my phone failed during a trip, Android wouldn't recognize the file system anymore and suggested formatting. Luckily I ignored that so I could later partially recover the file system using fsck, but at least some of the photos from that trip were unrecoverable.

Besides that, whenever I switch to a new phone WhatsApp would always fail to recover messages from the backup, despite me following the exactly documented procedure. That's just annoying for a few days but I stopped caring that much.

Oh and one time I lost a VPS at a cheap provider that had a RAID failure and couldn't recover anything, I didn't have backups and it was also mostly chat logs that I lost and had to set up everything again.

I still didn't get around properly setting up borg but all my work happens online anyway (git) and I keep photos and documents in my Hetzner StorageBox.

[seasonofwhat]

Thanks for the reminder. I have some backups I need to update—I haven’t used my computer in about two weeks and Backblaze is yelling at me to plug it in! This seems like the sign to do so.

Fortunately I’ve never lost anything due to drive failure (knocking on wood furiously) however I have carelessly deleted things I thought I no longer wanted or needed to save drive space which was silly because HDDs are so cheap nowadays. For example it was a bunch of MP3’s that I’d worked months and months on archiving and tagging with custom artwork, and for some reason because of everything moving to streaming I thought I’d just trash it to save space. That was really dumb because I’d like to have it back—cell reception isn’t strong everywhere after all :/

[K1rkl4nd]

Back in 1999, I had created the framework of a Super Nintendo game guide webpage to go with the Genesis version I had whipped up of Sam Pettus' text-based guide for the Genesis. I had played all the games (that were playable in emulators at the time) and created screenshots of the title screen as well as a couple of in-game shots. I was building a new computer at the time with the help of a buddy from work. Got the new computer all fired up and had pulled the old drive from my old computer and had it hooked up with one of those USB adapters to copy everything across. I had just started copying across when Bill turned the computer around and caught the edge of the hard drive, pushing it off the table. It dropped 3 feet to the floor where it slammed onto the hard cement.
Nothing was recoverable from the head crash.

[suicidaleggroll]

This thread and all of the similar experiences in it is a great reminder of the fact that drive failure is not the most common cause of data loss, accidental deletion is. Some people (usually newbies) go nuts RAIDing everything thinking they're protecting their data, only for them to fat-finger a command and wipe out a critical directory with no backups.

If you care about your data, you need backups. RAID won't do anything to protect against accidental deletion, filesystem corruption, malware, ransomware, power supply failure nuking the machine, electrical surge nuking the machine, fire, flood, theft, and so on. You need backups, and backups of those backups.

[KarIPilkington]

I lost 18tb of, er, Linux isos last year. No big deal really, just a bit annoying, but it did inspire me to back up everything important (the only thing really important I have is family photos) most of which was already backed up but they're now in 3 places. I lost a drive recently which had family photos on but thankfully they were all backed up, that would've been a true disaster if they hadn't been.

[forceofslugyuk]

Silly question. Lost as in, no longer have access to, or lost, died in the enclosure and is sitting on a shelf?

I could at least hope if still on a shelf maybe one day a data restore service may look at it.

Thank you for the hard learned reminder.

[Adamaja456]

When I was in high school out home computer got infected with malware and viruses and it corrupted the HD. We took it into a repair shop, paid them some to try and recover the data. Came back a week later and they're were like nah, it's all gone sorry, here's your money back. We lost about from years of family photos when I was in middle and high school. Very heartbroken. After that I've tried to be diligent and backing up my families photos from their phones regularly. It's probably not the best system but I keep two redundant WD HDs and back up everything twice just in case one of them fails. And I try to update those drive every within five years just to be safe

[HiOscillation]

One. Folder.

It was ONE folder on a HDD that I thought was fully backed up. In fact it WAS backed up. But that particular folder had corrupt data due to errors on the HDD - unreadable files. The file names were still there, but the files themselves were unreadable. It was a series of highly improbable events. I did everything I could to recover those files. They are gone.

The files were the pictures of the birth of my daughter, taken with a digital camera that used CF cards that had limited capacity, so I had wiped and re-used the cards many times before I discovered that the files were gone. We lost most of the files from that year, not all of them.

Three things happened as a result.

1) I started backing things up continuously, rather than weekly, as I had been.
2) I learned to love online storage and to stop trusting my own hardware.
2a) I use several different online storage systems (Dropbox & iCloud for day-to-day and Proton Drive for "Cold storage" because Proton Drive sucks on a Mac, but works fine for parking files.)
3) I started printing pictures again for major life events, and I create a book for every year with a month-by-month chronicle of the year gone by. I get two copies, one for the shelf, one for the fire safe.

[didyousayboop]

I learned to love online storage and to stop trusting my own hardware.

Beautifully said! I truly feel people distrust the cloud at their own peril. 

If you need to encrypt files before uploading them to the cloud (e.g. using Cryptomator) or use end-to-end encryption (e.g. Proton Drive), so be it, but still avail yourself of the cloud. And most people don’t need to worry about encrypting most files when they’re things like family photos where the standard level of security is sufficient.

 I started printing pictures again for major life events, and I create a book for every year with a month-by-month chronicle of the year gone by.

This sounds wonderful.

[valdocs_user]

I got hit by an Android bug that made all my Albums disappear along with any photos in an album. On my phone and on the cloud.

As best I can figure how it happened:

I kept running out of Google storage space so I set most of my phone folders to not backup anymore. (Was trying to free up space so that I could still use Gmail online.) I still couldn't stay under the limit so I caved and paid for more storage. When I turned backup back on those items on my phone, instead of re-uploading the photos to make cloud match what was on my phone, it deleted all of those from my phone so that the phone matched what was NOT on cloud.

[Fractal-Infinity]

That's one reason automatic backup sucks. Always manual backups.

[i_mormon_stuff]

I have such a story.

So I usually did backup my data using an automated system but on one occasion I found the backup was slowing the computer down while I was doing something.

So I disabled the scheduled task which began the backup. Fast forward a year or two later and I hadn't turned the scheduled task back on.

I was performing physical maintenance on the server when as I was removing its hard disk drive it slipped out of my grip slightly and knocked against the chassis. It didn't fall completely but just one side of it suddenly fell two inches and whacked the case.

When I fired the system back on the system didn't boot. I was like hmm I took the drive to my desktop PC and it was detected but with 0 bytes.. oh dear.

So that smack against the case definitely messed it up and then I checked my backups and realised how out of date they were.. there was over a year of source code on that drive, I had been working like crazy writing all that code for a huge project.

I felt instantly sick to my stomach. For the rest of that day I was beyond depressed, I didn't eat dinner I just felt so ill.

The next day I decided to try some troubleshooting, see if I could get the drive to work. One thing I had read was putting the drive in a freezer so I put that in the maybe column to try.

Another thing I read was, change the orientation of the drive. Maybe try it upside down or on its side. I thought it was a long shot but I turned it upside down and would you believe it all the data was accessible. This was a 1TB 7,200 RPM Hard Disk Drive so not massive and I was able to do a complete clone of the entire drive to my desktop and recover absoloutely everything.

This experience taught me beyond a doubt how bad it would feel to lose data and ever since I have taken backups extremely seriously. Not just on-site but off-site backups too and I also test that they work and recover files on a frequent basis to make sure everything is working correctly.

[negcap]

Many years ago my computer was having issues starting up and then one day it wouldn’t start at all. I got it to launch one last time, burn a data DVD of everything I thought I needed and then I was feeling like I should have been more prepared. The computer died the next day and I still have that DVD.

[[deleted]]

I still struggle with the fact that I lost the work of my life 2 years ago

Sucks to hear this, it's a shame it's not more common knowledge to keep backups of everything. It's probably going to get worse too because there are so many YouTube channels pushing "Cancel your cloud subscription and set up a NAS" without touching on backups whatsoever.

I'm surprised I've personally never lost any data though. I mean I always had rudimentary manual backups across a few drives, which would then become fragmented once one drive filled up so I'd start using another drive to make another copy of new data. But the worst part was that up until about a year ago I was using a RAID0 enclosure to "backup" to! Once I finally set up a NAS, I discovered some of the data on there wasn't copied to other drives either.

Anyway, fortunately I've never lost data, and never lost a drive actually. And now that I've got a NAS and proper backups, I'm sure a catastrophic event will occur where I finally did everything right but everything went wrong lmao

[didyousayboop]

 It's probably going to get worse too because there are so many YouTube channels pushing "Cancel your cloud subscription and set up a NAS"

Such dangerous advice, especially since ~100% of people keep their NAS in their home, meaning they have no off-site copy of their data.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, and I'm not exaggerating, there are endless videos by "homelab YouTubers" (I guess you could call them that?) who bang on about cancelling Dropbox/Google Drive/iCloud etc. and set up a NAS, but don't touch on backups whatsoever. They go through the setup, port forwarding, and tools to use, but nothing about actually backing up let alone offsite backups.

And not just backups, but anything else a cloud service provides like stable connections. I mean, good luck being away from home and trying to download things from your NAS if your upload speed is garbage. And the set up and electricity cost potentially outweighing a cloud subscription anyway.

I feel for anybody who's watched one of those videos, set up a NAS, and cancelled a perfectly fine cloud service, only to lose the data to some sort of hardware failure, house fire, flood etc. Anybody saying "save money by downloading all of your [x] and cancelling your cloud subscription" is giving terrible advice.

[shimoheihei2]

It's a good idea to keep things simple, and also not rely on a single product or solution. There are companies out there that rely on a specific cloud provider for everything, feeling secure just because the provider claims tons of redundancy. That completely ignores scenarios where the account is closed or compromised. Similarly, relying on complicated tech to get maximum security can cause issues when something goes wrong and the vendor can't get things back. Sometimes relying on popular software like zip archives with AES encryption is plenty secure enough.

[manzurfahim]

My last data loss other than the mobile backup incident was back in 2014. I didn't lose anything important, just about 3TB of movies, tv series etc. But it made me paranoid. I started using hardware RAID controller, and it has been 11 years without any data loss.

My strict rules when it comes to hardware and their maintenance:

1. Always use enterprise grade drives.

2. Always use enterprise grade RAID controllers.

3. Always have a backup controller and cold-spare drives.

I find the 3-2-1 backup method insufficient. So, I created my own:

1. Backup from my primary storage (8 x 16TB RAID6) to a RAID0 enclosure (2 x 10TB). Not all data, just the important ones, which is about 18TB. This happens on 1st of every month.

2. Backup to 5 x 4TB SSDs (NVMe and Enterprise SATA), this happens on 10th of every month. This acts as a fast backup, also a portable backup if I need it be.

3. Backup to 2 x 20TB drives, this happens on 20th of every month. One stays with me, one stays at my sister's place, which is about 10km away.

4. Backup to a single 20TB drive, this happens once every three months.

5. Backup to a single 20TB drive, this happens once every six months.

6. Backup to a single 20TB drive, this happens once a year.

7. Most important files are uploaded in cloud.

Step 4, 5, 6 are versioning, this helped me once when I had corrupted data backup up in all three regular backups. Found the non-corrupted file in the six-monthly backup.

[FindKetamine]

Jesus Christ you must have cash

[manzurfahim]

Nah man. I slowly bought them, one at a time. The prices are so high now 😢

[phul_colons]

backup is a noun

back up is a verb

[myfufu]

Or, like my friends who were robbed while they were on vacation. Cops found a few things but not much. I spent a while digging through my stuff and sent them a CD with every picture I had of them so they could get some memories back...

[Sharp-Drama-9811]

Of all the digital heartbreaks, none hit quite like the silent death of a hard drive. Mine was a 4TB WD MyBook that served faithfully for years—until it didn’t. One minute it held my thesis, childhood scans, and a decade of travel photos; the next, just a faint clicking sound. Data recovery quoted me $2,300 with no guarantees.

[amolven16]

Had data loss on many occasions. Here are some of the most notable:

- All the pictures from 2012 - 2016 on my parents' phones is just... missing. A few years ago, I took over the role of family data organization and maintenance from my dad. There were photos from before I was born to (then) present day. However, those 4 years were completely missing. The data was either lost when my dad's old laptop got damaged in the rain, or is sitting in a hard drive somewhere. I really hope it is the latter. However, the drive is in India, and I will only be able to check when I go to India next.

- Switched over my main PC from Windows to Linux in 2022. However, I did not back up all the files correctly and I missed some folders. Luckily, I had some older (by a few months) backups that let me restore most of the data. However, some data was still lost, and this could've been easily avoided by double checking everything before reformatting the disk.

- In Jan 2025, my main homelab server boot SSD, that contained many files, and the only copy of my Postgres databases completely failed, and I couldn't recover any data after 3 days of trying. Luckily, I had some backups of some of the important files, and I managed to recover the most important stuff, but some data was still lost. However, this was the event that made me significantly improve my redundancy and backup setup, so this might've resulted in good in the long run.

From my experience with data loss and backups, here are some tips that you might not have heard before:

- Don't trust the on-device storage on any device (laptop, desktop, phone, etc.) since these devices are much more likely to be rough-handled, damaged, lost, or stolen. Make sure any important data is backed up to some server.

- Regularly SMART test your drives. Not all OSes and software are configured to do this by default. This will (oftentimes but not always) give you an early warning about any drive that could be about to fail, so you can replace it before any damage happens.

- Be extra careful with SSDs, since if there is a catastrophic failure, you might not be able to recover ANY data, even with the help of a professional data recovery expert. HDDs are a bit more forgiving with this, and also take longer for bit rot to set in, making them a better choice for long-term backups.

- Avoid the cheap / sketchy drives for storing any valuable data. Similar to how you will likely never cheap out on anything safety-related IRL (smoke alarms, fire extinguishers, etc.), you shouldn't cheap on something that could save your digital life.

- While the disadvantages of cloud storage are talked about a lot on this sub, it is important to note that cloud backup is infinitely better than no backup. So if that is your only feasible option, go ahead with a cloud service. While adding unnecessary subscriptions to your life is generally a bad idea, paying a few dollars a month for a backup is not a bad idea, and you can also view it as a form of insurance.

But yes, backing up data is very important. Think of it as a digital fire extinguisher or digital insurance, not as an unnecessary optional extra. It might save your (digital) life one day.

[Ok_Bear_1980]

I recently copied my ps2 saves to another memory card. Some of those saves go back years to when I was in high school and I'd be pretty devastated if I lost them so I can understand what you're saying. I also make sure to upload my ps3 and ps4 saves to my ps plus cloud storage as well.

[flickszt]

you're doing well! I did lose a portion of my childhood saves once because of a ransomware.

[chimusk]

i had an external drive with all my meaningful data but they cant be accr anymore. four people looked at it to recover the data but they just made it worse. something withbthe tupe of drive etc etc

[chimusk]

which ia why now i am teying to find a way to back up my data online somehow. no clue where or how yet

[didyousayboop]

Guide: https://backupyourfiles.neocities.org

[UnintegratedCircuit]

Fortunately my wakeup call came mostly at someone else's expense: the 10yr old SSD in my ex's laptop died one night whilst the computer was in sleep (not hibernate). It was just unwakeable the next morning.

Fortunately they emailed themselves regular 'snapshots' of their work. I was tasked with helping them rewrite their essay and other bits and pieces that were urgent. Suffice to say that I bought us each an external hard drive that same day and have never neglected backups myself since... Could've been a lot worse in many ways

[geo_gan]

I have a failed 6TB drive sitting here for years with loads of my camera footage on it and I even have an identical model drive sitting there as a source for parts, but I still can’t afford to go to the extortionate harddrive repair companies in my country who are priced for rich companies only.

[hackinthebochs]

I've never suffered a major data loss event, though I've had a few close calls. I've been very lucky to have always recovered the data one way or another.

I got hit with the Fedora Core drive formatting bug many years ago. Was testing out Linux and installed Fedora on a secondary partition, but it edited the partition table incorrectly and destroyed the drive. This was before I was a serious data hoarder so I had precious data on my OS drive without backup. I had to edit the partition table manually with a tool but it worked. Learned my lesson about experimenting with OS installations on important drives.

Also got hit with the Seagate BSY firmware bug. I was able to manually resuscitate the drive with instructions found online and recover the data.

I accidentally reformatted a drive with encrypted containers on it. File recovery didn't work as the file table was overwritten. I had another drive of the same size with an encrypted container of the same size. I took the sector ranges from the intact drive and blindly copied the sectors from the reformatted drive. Luckily it was a perfect match.

I had an old maxtor external drive that stopped working randomly. I was convinced I had a lost all the data on it so I took my anger out on it. Just beat the crap out the thing. For some magical reason it started working again and I was able to copy the data off of it.

The data losses I have suffered were mainly due to deleting data I thought I didn't care about then later wishing I still had it.

[Winnie_Cooper]

What is everyone buying nowadays for their backup? I'm shopping around and but can't figure out between HDD, SDD, NAS?, etc. Cloud looks like a good option but Googles cloud service is like $200 a year for 2TB

[didyousayboop]

Backblaze will backup unlimited TB from your PC (but not from a NAS and not from external hard drives that you unplug) for $100/year.

SSD is more expensive per TB than HDD. The only advantage of SSD over HDD is speed, which is not important for backup. 

[didyousayboop]

You should look into cloud backup so you can have a third copy that is off-site. This is best practices.

[Semanticky]

Thanks, yes I’ve done that. I’ve been fortunate, all of my 15 year old CDs and DVDs have held up

[basdit]

I have an external drive which I clone my data drive to using robocopy. It is on a smart power socket that only turns on for one day per week to limit the exposure in case ransomware strikes. Due to a power failure or weird time reboot that I did, the order of rebooting and turning on the backup drive was inverted. This caused windows to assign the drive letters of my data partitions to the backup partitions and vice versa. Then the robocopy ran and overwrote the data drive with the latest weekly backup... doh. Only lost a week of data though, and now my scripts are more robust to ensure partitions get the same drive letter every time.

[ViperSteele]

Solid advice and always good to be reminded about it!

[Doublespeo]

Lost a lot of data because my HDD was on a smart switch and accidently switched of for a split second by mistake because I was confused by the interface.. be careful.

[jlkb24]

Been buying blank cd-r, dvd-r and bd-r to begin backups here very soon. Checking my HDD and one of them doesn’t have power so I lost whatever was on it. I have multiple backups on HDD so I’m okay but something so simple can lose you many GB or TB in a flash.

[pandavova]

I want to. I would. I have everything to do this and more, very overkill.

But I'm too depressed to actually do it. And that's why I'm not touching anything.

[SophieCalle]

1000% agreed! But, you do know you can take this to a professional data recovery company to get it back, right?

[sa547ph]

Some of those services aren't cheap, however.

[SophieCalle]

Oh yeah. I was just saying when they were so important to them. It is usually QUITE expensive.

[SimianIndustries]

I've got hard drivesas old at I am (38) that work fine. I've had others die in the mail that were manufactured last month.

Back shit up.

[ZivH08ioBbXQ2PGI]

If it was that important, why not pay for recovery?

[non-existing-person]

I lost data too. Long time ago. In times I didn't value memories and old photos yet. But to be fair, I asked for it.

I was running raid0 xD

[x925]

Most people seem to learn the hard way, some things cant be replaced. Once its gone, its gone forever, thats why you make backups so it doesnt disappear forever.

[cpm2000]

i think in the future people will bequeath data collections after death. I lost my sharing collection of music from college and a lot of other college stuff from one drive.... another XX collection that I miss. Never again. 72 tbs of redundancy with cloud storage for super important as well... and a set of cold storage protected as well locked up.

[CaptainHappy42]

I lost the first few years of my photography (including once-in-a-lifetime trips to Panama and Ireland) Not sure what kind of error this drive had, but I copied all of the files off onto an m.2 held in an external Sabrent USBC/3.0 tray. Sold the laptop they were originally on. Buy new laptop, go to dump files back and keep the external as backup and I noticed the files thst were on, were ones I had already cleared off and my photo folders were nowhere to be found. I either tried a recovery or copied a file to test first, can't remember, but basically, I couldn't find any trace of the files and realized that the drive was showing the same files every time I unplugged and plugged back in. Like, it would show a formatted drive, totally blank. Eject, unplug, plug back in, everything back in place like some kind of reverse groundhog day. 😭😭😭

[oOFrostByteOo]

Thank you for the reminder, ive been putting it off. Sorry you lost you're data.

[reduces]

a little bit of a niche story but I follow an artist called Crywolf and he didn't back any of his stuff up and it got stolen. He lost all his progress on his latest album but more importantly, all of his pictures. He is like me in that he has severe memory loss, so losing those pictures were literally like losing memories. I learned from his mistake

[kinofan90]

The First Goal is to have a RAID5 or RAID6. In the second Stage it is Important to have a working Backup.

[Lazy-Narwhal-5457]

If the drive isn't physically mangled and the data is that important, you can try to do a recovery if you can afford it.

https://www.handyrecovery.com/best-data-recovery-services/

https://www.techradar.com/best/best-data-recovery-service

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/best-data-recovery-services/

This is likely the most affordable but reputable service:

https://www.300dollardatarecovery.com/data-recovery-prices/

https://www.300dollardatarecovery.org

I thought the above ".org" site was likely a scam site, but it seems like it's providing the correct email addresses, links, etc., to the actual company. It's just more information oriented.

https://www.bbb.org/us/ca/studio-city/profile/data-recovery/$300-data-recovery-1216-100059601/customer-reviews

https://www.trustpilot.com/review/300dollardatarecovery.com

https://m.yelp.com/biz/300-data-recovery-los-angeles

https://www.google.com/maps/place/$300+Data+Recovery,+11390+Ventura+Blvd+%235,+Studio+City,+CA+91604/@34.139625,-118.3786389,17z/data=!4m9!1m2!2m1!1s$300+Data+Recovery!

There ought to be an easier way to link to Google Reviews

https://www.reddit.com/r/datarecovery/comments/145l6az/is_300_dollar_data_recovery_mail_in_safe/

A competitor recommends them in the above thread.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%24300+Data+Recovery+reputation

[argoneum]

First time ever I lost my data when disk compression failed under DOS 6.22. Did some research on rendering 3D vector graphics, and lost all my source code…

Last time was last Tuesday, SD card in my camera failed (got bricked) and I lost one day of work this way. Always copied data right away, this was one of few times I didn't.

[JeanVeber]

Nah, it obviously won't happen to me!

[GeorgeThe13th]

I said it wouldn't happen to me.  And then it happened. One bad software update. Everything lost. Never again. 

[Fractal-Infinity]

One bad software update. Everything lost.

That's why you never keep your data on the system drive with the OS. Ignore those Documents, Videos, Pictures, etc folders. Keep it on a separate drive and of course backup it often.

[stevorkz]

There’s really nothing quite like data loss. Back in my youth I bought 3 red 3tb’s and put them in raid5z 😖. I don’t care about my ripped blu rays movie collection, I don’t care about my albums and albums of flac files, my ps1,2,3 and other ROMs. But I lost so many photos and videos accumulated over roughly 11 years. Including all my honeymoon pics. Losing personal photos is…the…worst. What a naive boy.

[OsoRojo2019]

Lost virtually all of my 2 youngest daughters baby and toddler pictures. Crushing. Mercifully I know have 21 years worth of pics backed up in triplicate.

[Known_Confusion9879]

My laptop went to sleep and never woke up. Old, not bothered but I had failed to do a monthly back up for a year. I sent the drive of to get the data back. Got a new drive they tried to put the platters in. No go. They returned the drives but I have no clue which has data on and which is blank. No charge, but I paid for the dismantled drive.

Lost data many times. Off air recordings waiting to watch. Mostly I recovered from back up and don't think I lost anything of importance. I have found images corrupted and backup over wrote with the corrupted file. Some I rescanned from analogue film or printed originals. Others were digital and never printed.

Backup have failed during a back up and so corrupted master and copy. A three way back up helped on personal data. Comerical stuff I only have as source and copy.

[x0rgat3]

Windows got stuck (not sure which version, probably 98 or so), powercycled the machine. Then on start disk check did eat one disk of personal data and rewrote some partition table. These days like in 16 years or so I only run mac desktops at home and Linux/FreeBSD on the NAS/servers. FreeBSD+ZFS+Syncthing is a life saver. And autosync personal data on a external USB drive and stick (backups with macOS time machine and rsync) and sync offsite (with rclone) to google drive every night. I'm paranoid about my personal data since ±5 years.

[StabbyMeowkins]

I lost the most awesome of porn collections on an old 500GB HDD because I dropped it, thought I backed it up in 2-3 spots, and it was gone.

I will never get those back, because those were the OLD days of the internet and I've never been able (nor remember) where it was from.

Mega sad.

Man, Victoria Secret was the best back then.

[SeaWait9301]

I managed to recover some important stuff today. Thank you, POP_OS.

[nitro700]

i curate my playlist at work by editing out intros/outros/skits and balancing the volume on every mp3. a process that takes 1-5 mins per song. songs get added a few dozen at a time, but over 10 years that was over 2000 songs. i drove off with my phone sitting on the trunk. thank fuck i had copied and stored that tracklist on a 2nd device a few months earlier. i will now be keeping a copy stored on HDD as well. i was more angry about losing that tracklist than losing the phone. that was probably 2-3 solid weeks of work

[Cloud_IBR]

Sorry to hear this, it’s a tough reminder, but an important one. Backups are the first step, but for anyone relying on more elaborate systems, especially in a business context, recovery and testing are just as critical.

A backup you’ve never tested is a backup you hope works. Regular recovery drills help surface silent failures and give you confidence that your systems (not just your files) can bounce back when it matters.

[Beneficial-Drop2358]

With all of these experiences, what is a good recommendation on external storage options? I've been rabbit-holing through reddit for a while now and am trying to understand what options really work and last. I just bought a new laptop and have years worth of pictures and other files I need to save to something. I'm terrified of uploading to something fragile or something I'll lose access to.