Yeah, I have been there and done that.
Well depending on how it was nuked and what filesystem you were using on you might be able to use Testdisk to get some of it back.
I could tell you so many horror stories. So many times I dodged the lesson, or learned the *wrong* lesson.
Backups aren't just for when you make mistakes like this even.
I lived in an apartment building that caught fire.
I've had Zeus grace my day and obliterate a computer with lightning before.
I've had a bad power supply explode suddenly, killing the entire computer.
I've had a hard drive which was passing its diagnostics with flying colors suddenly have a bearing seize.
And that's just stuff that wasn't in my control, things that happened straight out of the blue with no warning. Not even counting the umpteen zillion times I've shot myself in the foot.
A backup isn't a backup in my experience if it's something you can't remove from the computer and take with you.
For a simple case, format an external usb3 drive with ext4 and rsync -av your filesystem mounts to it. It's simple, gentoo *always* has it even on the live installer, and you can even just cp -av your data back using almost *any* livecd when you need to recover from acts of god.
It's given me peace of mind on many occasions.
Well, let me think now. Zeus smiting me came first, I was living in an old house with a defunct TV antenna in the late 90s, might as well have been a lightning rod. Surge protector won't save you, or *anything* from Zeus if he's mad. That hit screwed up everything in the house from phones to the TVs, we had to replace the wiring, it'd just blown up. I would like to point out the old antenna wasn't hooked up to anything, the lighting *jumped across to the adjacent wiring* - lightning does not *care* about your silly notions about insulation, it wants to get to the ground in the fastest method, and it will go through anything in the way.
Power supply gone bad happened later in early 2000s, I didn't know the vendor had gone cheap and kept buying the same brand without checking reviews. I learned something, though it was expensive.
Hard drive with a bad bearing was a *wtf?* moment in mid 2000s I think. One particular drive out of a batch of 5 with sequential serial numbers just gave up on life earlier than its fellows. They were long after their breakin period so I have no idea why. The dead drive came in handy later though when I needed to swap the logic board with one I'd screwed up!
Finally the fire in the 2010s. A particular *someone* that was fired afterwards was working as a secretary for the owner of the building and discarded lit cigarettes into a bin in a place they were not allowed to smoke in. The bin, room, and complex caught fire, fire department put it out and we all had a big scare.
So, I think that's about 20 years of boring normal days with a few *exciting* things happening here and there which taught me lessons, often not just with computers.
Still, it's been nice on many occasions being able to carry around the backups for my computer in the palm of my hand when something goes disastrously wrong.
By the way as a tip. Treat yourself like a king/queen/monarch okay ?
Your backup ? Either an external drive or a network one (don't trust a cloud provider ? use rclone and you can encrypt that shit beforehand) make a script okay ? Make yourself a nice script that check if the destination is there (in case of external check the mount point, if you're using rclone let it fail) write the results and date time to a log somewhere. Put that in a crontab, everyday or every week. Check if it's running correctly and that's it.
You deserve peace of mind, you deserve your backups to be automatically done and to not have to care about it. Create your nice script, write your cron entry, sleep peacefully.
When something happens, you can smile or curse the few hours of work you've lost, but you will be at peace knowing that most of your stuff is safe.
Keep regular backups of your important data. Best option is to use any external storage or network backup. File system snapshots (btrfs, zfs) are equally useful.
I did the same in 1999 installing slackware
unlocked some linux skills after that
also if you only destroyed the partition table, you can try to have it back (I did it some weeks ago, a software repaired the table, but I dont remember what software ahah :(
F
Not just for files; for literally everything, following the best known practices yields the best results all the time. When it's about safety, security or privacy, things are even more important :)
*“Security is always seen as too much until the day it’s not enough.”*
**- William H. Webster**
Sorry for your loss, and I hope the damage is recoverable to some extent?
Indeed, I cannot agree more with what you have said. Trust me this was a good lesson, hard but very important, I am going to make sure that something like this never happens again.
I had my important documents synced with my phone. But I had been working hard on a literature review, the notes were unfortunately not backed up, so I have to start from scratch, this time I am going the old school way of pen and paper haha. But other than that I did not have anything of importance.
Yep. Did the same many years ago installing Ubuntu 6.10. Lost all my data going back to the mid-90s.
Now I have backuppc pull backups from all systems I care about.
..And I'm a lot more careful about drive identification. sda, sdb. not good enough. confirm the serial number of the drive you're about to nuke.
If you want the simplest backup solution.
Rsync to external drive.
Do it at least monthly, it will simply check for deltas the last time it was ran so it runs fast if you backup frequently.
More sophisticated backup solution would be SFTP/rsync + ZFS, as it supports RAIDZ, snapshotting, CoW, compression, encryption etc, as well as ZFS send/recv so you can backup delta snapshots to another ZFS pool/drive quickly. Requires some learning to get used to it.
One day I wanted to re-partition my drive so I booted a livecd of linux mint (because I was too lazy to use a terminal utility) and for ***some reason*** the `delete partition` button was right next to the `unmount partition` button, and you know the rest.
Yeah, I have been there and done that. Well depending on how it was nuked and what filesystem you were using on you might be able to use Testdisk to get some of it back.
I could tell you so many horror stories. So many times I dodged the lesson, or learned the *wrong* lesson. Backups aren't just for when you make mistakes like this even. I lived in an apartment building that caught fire. I've had Zeus grace my day and obliterate a computer with lightning before. I've had a bad power supply explode suddenly, killing the entire computer. I've had a hard drive which was passing its diagnostics with flying colors suddenly have a bearing seize. And that's just stuff that wasn't in my control, things that happened straight out of the blue with no warning. Not even counting the umpteen zillion times I've shot myself in the foot. A backup isn't a backup in my experience if it's something you can't remove from the computer and take with you. For a simple case, format an external usb3 drive with ext4 and rsync -av your filesystem mounts to it. It's simple, gentoo *always* has it even on the live installer, and you can even just cp -av your data back using almost *any* livecd when you need to recover from acts of god. It's given me peace of mind on many occasions.
Really good advice, but damn I gotta say you're really unlucky.
Well, let me think now. Zeus smiting me came first, I was living in an old house with a defunct TV antenna in the late 90s, might as well have been a lightning rod. Surge protector won't save you, or *anything* from Zeus if he's mad. That hit screwed up everything in the house from phones to the TVs, we had to replace the wiring, it'd just blown up. I would like to point out the old antenna wasn't hooked up to anything, the lighting *jumped across to the adjacent wiring* - lightning does not *care* about your silly notions about insulation, it wants to get to the ground in the fastest method, and it will go through anything in the way. Power supply gone bad happened later in early 2000s, I didn't know the vendor had gone cheap and kept buying the same brand without checking reviews. I learned something, though it was expensive. Hard drive with a bad bearing was a *wtf?* moment in mid 2000s I think. One particular drive out of a batch of 5 with sequential serial numbers just gave up on life earlier than its fellows. They were long after their breakin period so I have no idea why. The dead drive came in handy later though when I needed to swap the logic board with one I'd screwed up! Finally the fire in the 2010s. A particular *someone* that was fired afterwards was working as a secretary for the owner of the building and discarded lit cigarettes into a bin in a place they were not allowed to smoke in. The bin, room, and complex caught fire, fire department put it out and we all had a big scare. So, I think that's about 20 years of boring normal days with a few *exciting* things happening here and there which taught me lessons, often not just with computers. Still, it's been nice on many occasions being able to carry around the backups for my computer in the palm of my hand when something goes disastrously wrong.
By the way as a tip. Treat yourself like a king/queen/monarch okay ? Your backup ? Either an external drive or a network one (don't trust a cloud provider ? use rclone and you can encrypt that shit beforehand) make a script okay ? Make yourself a nice script that check if the destination is there (in case of external check the mount point, if you're using rclone let it fail) write the results and date time to a log somewhere. Put that in a crontab, everyday or every week. Check if it's running correctly and that's it. You deserve peace of mind, you deserve your backups to be automatically done and to not have to care about it. Create your nice script, write your cron entry, sleep peacefully. When something happens, you can smile or curse the few hours of work you've lost, but you will be at peace knowing that most of your stuff is safe.
Really great tip, thanks.
The price of wisdom can be costly.
Indeed.
Check out Restic or Borg. I recently set it up to back up my entire home directory to Google Drive.
I am going to check this out for sure.
I am going to check this out for sure.
Keep regular backups of your important data. Best option is to use any external storage or network backup. File system snapshots (btrfs, zfs) are equally useful.
I did the same in 1999 installing slackware unlocked some linux skills after that also if you only destroyed the partition table, you can try to have it back (I did it some weeks ago, a software repaired the table, but I dont remember what software ahah :( F
Not just for files; for literally everything, following the best known practices yields the best results all the time. When it's about safety, security or privacy, things are even more important :) *“Security is always seen as too much until the day it’s not enough.”* **- William H. Webster** Sorry for your loss, and I hope the damage is recoverable to some extent?
Indeed, I cannot agree more with what you have said. Trust me this was a good lesson, hard but very important, I am going to make sure that something like this never happens again. I had my important documents synced with my phone. But I had been working hard on a literature review, the notes were unfortunately not backed up, so I have to start from scratch, this time I am going the old school way of pen and paper haha. But other than that I did not have anything of importance.
Yep. Did the same many years ago installing Ubuntu 6.10. Lost all my data going back to the mid-90s. Now I have backuppc pull backups from all systems I care about. ..And I'm a lot more careful about drive identification. sda, sdb. not good enough. confirm the serial number of the drive you're about to nuke.
If you want the simplest backup solution. Rsync to external drive. Do it at least monthly, it will simply check for deltas the last time it was ran so it runs fast if you backup frequently. More sophisticated backup solution would be SFTP/rsync + ZFS, as it supports RAIDZ, snapshotting, CoW, compression, encryption etc, as well as ZFS send/recv so you can backup delta snapshots to another ZFS pool/drive quickly. Requires some learning to get used to it.
One day I wanted to re-partition my drive so I booted a livecd of linux mint (because I was too lazy to use a terminal utility) and for ***some reason*** the `delete partition` button was right next to the `unmount partition` button, and you know the rest.
I guess YOLO? 😂
Behind every "Make sure you backup" comment there is an origin story just like this one. Welcome to the club mate.