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Have you ever lost all of your data?😰

Alexandra Grazhevskaja on October 31, 2019

It happened to me in a distant past - my PC was stolen. And the worst thing - I had all my life data there and had no backup. All of my data, start...
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Victor Meunier

I once dropped my external HDD with A LOT of photos and videos inside.. For many years I was not able to recover anything. One day, while cleaning my stuff, I stumble upon this old HDD. Now that I was running Linux, I thought there might be a tool that could do some magic, and I was right! I was able to recover pretty much everything! Since then, I try to maintain at least 3 backups (two locals and one distant) for the most important stuff :)

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Alexandra Grazhevskaja

What an inspiring story with a happy end!👍 Yeah, I should learn from you about 3 backups.😅

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Victor Meunier

I think the key is automation. If you have to do the backups yourself, you're going to forget. Especially when you're focused on important stuff, and that's when you absolutely want backups!

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Alexandra Grazhevskaja

You are right, automation is the key in most of the fields now. Especially when it is about your personal life, where you want to switch off the brain a little bit.

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Ben Halpern

That's neat

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Ben Halpern

I know someone who accidentally deleted their entire production database, with no recent backup.

Lost. All. The. Data.

It was a personal small business that they used to earn about $400-$500 a month on the side, so not a Fortune 500 disaster, but pretty personally meaningful.

They wound up being able to focus on supporting their best customers and having them re-create their accounts and ultimately recover from this, but it was a moment of very possibly throwing in the towel for the whole small venture.

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Alexandra Grazhevskaja

What a teaching story. Side project is something, that you usually put all your heart and soul into it, so I can feel their pain in this story!

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Yash Dave

The Cover Pic is pretty accurate when it happened to me for the first time. Wasn't anything important, just lost Linux installs along with dev repo's setup! Has happened 3 times till now. Bless dual booting and Windows/Linux updates. 😇

Aye atleast I am confident and up to date on installation settings that way 😅😛 and I do backup important stuff, so all's good over here.

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Timothee Simon

Back when I was a student, I once lost all my data during the exams, including all the project and report I still had to give to give to the teachers.
Hopefully I had shared most of it with friends who where able to send me back old versions of my works.
Conclusion : share your homework to your friends it will come back to you 😁

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Alexandra Grazhevskaja

It happend ones during my university studies, that someone just gave a copy pasted homework to the professor, and that professor found that it was him, who wrote it when he was young. Backuping through ages...😁

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João Augusto • Edited

Sorry to hear that! Fortunately never experienced losing data at that scale - but hearing that makes me a bit anxious. I care about data, specially if is mine and I've been trying to back it up as much as I can. More than backing up data is recover it, otherwise can be useless!

I've read this article the other day and I thought it would be relevant to post it here:
How to become device agnostic and what it means for your data

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Ha Tuan Em

When I learned in university. I used a laptop with HDD and windows OS and it was new laptop and good. At least I thought so. Then I decided moving data from my phone to laptop. But one day, my phone was crash and i thought "it's ok. I still have a laptop". But but but, at that day my laptop crash too because windows auto update and never launch again. And you know what ? My personal data in C disk. All data from videos trip to dog picture is gone when I install new window and I know the result. This is black day for me.
As you can said "That was a lesson for all the life - backup your personal data as well!!😅" or at least not store in C disk.

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Mohamed ELIDRISSI • Edited

After reading some comments, I feel like I'm lucky. I barely have anything sooo important except my repos that I put on github if its anything I want to keep and usually keep all my personal photos on Google Photos, so if its time to do a clean Windows install I can just hit the reset button and not give a sh*t about what's on my hard drive.

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Josh Ransley

I lost a few hundred photos back when I was still using my parents computer as a teenager. It was nothing of great importance, but I was upset nonetheless and vowed to do everything practical to not have that happen again.

Up until a few months ago I was backing up everything to two external HDDs, leaving one plugged in to back up routinely, while storing the other offsite and rotating occasionally.

Now I have a NAS which is my primary storage and one external HDD plugged into that for routine backups. I have an offsite backup from when I made the transition to the NAS but this is no longer being updated as data is spread across multiple drives.

I feel uneasy only having one up to date backup of the NAS, while the other is increasningly out of date and offsite. But I have >6TB of data to store and that gets expensive. Another drive is on my wishlist, to get back to two rotating backups.

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Alexandra Grazhevskaja

The most disappointing for me was to loose the photos from my childhood, and the photos of my cat (thousands and millions of them 😅).

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Craig McIlwrath

I accidentally permanently deleted a folder with almost all of my projects so small that they were never put on some remote git server. It wasn't too devastating (the most important stuff was backed up), but it was really annoying to lose some of my programs. I tried using a recovery tool to try to get some files back, but it didn't really work.

I'm glad I don't have any other stories like this that are more serious :)

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Médéric Burlet

Had a new PC and was hosting a goodbye party before moving to Singapore. The PC was used to play spotify to the big speakers (jack connection) and I had just transferred on it all data from the old PC (before selling it). I was gonna do the backup of all the photos and code that same evening.

Fast forward an hour in the party one of the kids tried to play with the cable and poof the PC dropped the main SSD was fine but the 2TB HDD were all the data was gone. tried sending it for repair but it was un-salvageable. Lost all my code from when I started, some interesting rpg-engine I was working on and about 500Gb of photos and videos from all my trips and more.

Now I have a setup at home with hard drives connected to raspberry pi and as soon as I finish photoshoots or important stuff I just send it to the network drive and then the raspberry handles cloud upload and redundancy.

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scorp13

People are divided into those who do not backup, and those who already do.

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I'm Luis! \^-^/

I dropped my laptop accidentally and and along everything else, lost a 3-month project that I never cared to push to the cloud. My motivation died and I never re-coded any of that.

RIP Twitaudio

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Alexandra Grazhevskaja

Sorry to hear!
RIP Twitaudio

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MλDC∅DƎZ

Yep, but recovered 1 partition with important data, hdd got corrupted

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lmuzquiz

Have two backups at least. One of them should be offsite. Phisically located elsewhere

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Erick Navarro

Backups? If you dont need to store some teras then any Dropbox version by any brand would be enough.

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Jack Xiao • Edited

Hardcopies for me, are safer and less volatile. I often go through my photos and get the ones I really like developed.

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Andy Zhao (he/him)

I've never done that as far as I know, but wanted to say that your cover image is 💯💯💯

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Alexandra Grazhevskaja

Thank you. Its just a famous mem in runet.🙂