It only takes a minute of your time to copy your important files to a drive or the cloud. I (potentially) lost one year of progress on a book I’m writing because of my negligence.
So please don’t be like me.
Keep three copies of your data: the original and at least two backups
Store the backups on different devices
Store one copy offsite in case of natural disaster such as fire
Test your backups. If you don’t know that they work, what’s the point.
That’s utterly miserable. What happened? Would it be at all possible for a professional to dig through the deep dark of your computer to try and find any remnants of the file/files you lost?
There might be a chance that it hasn’t been overridden yet or might be hiding in a place a regular person wouldn’t think to look.
I wish you luck though, it’s awful that happened to you.
Be careful who you back up with, as well, if you live in a country that could potentially get sanctioned by the US i.e. if you live outside the US.
My Raspberry Pi sd card failed in a not immediately obvious way, luckily I had a backup and it actually helped me restore most important stuff almost right away. Just fresh image, copy the stuff and it works.
Highly recommend setting up syncthing on at least 2 devices. Then you never have to worry, as it’s automatic.
It’s funny (or tragic?) because I have syncthing and did not bother sync my work. Only thought about it in retrospect.
Hrm, must have not been running. That’s its only job.
It’s not as good as a proper backup solution but it’s definitely much better than nothing.
It really depends on how many devices you’re talking about. Two is infinitely better than zero, but not ideal. If you’ve got several devices at several locations syncing files, I don’t see how that’s much worse than a cloud service. And amazon can’t look at my Weiner pics that way.
One problem with it is that deleting a file in Syncthing may also delete it on other machines. And a backup solution will keep multiple versions of old files which can be lifesaving if you make a bad edit.
(I’m kidding, of course. Making Jeff Bezos see my hog is a feature of AWS, not a defect.)
so what you’re telling me is that i need to back that thang up?
I recommend for writing that people make frequent versioned copies as well. For example after some amount of pages or time spent I’ll copy the file itself and rename it <filename>_backup<date> to try and protect against corruption that happens to part of the file without being noticed and just to have the option of rolling back to a previous iteration or at least looking at it. It can clutter things up a little but if you like you can put the backups in their own folder somewhere. Though this is obviously no substitute for backing up to another device as this method doesn’t protect you against your storage device failing, suffering corruption, malware, etc so it’s more important to do that.
Sorry this happened to you OP.
Sorry to hear that. You are not the only one who had to learn it the hard way :/
It’s even harder the second time… I should stick to ink and paper.
That’s awful! I’m sorry to hear that!
It also needs saying that RAID is not a backup.
But I’m sorry for your loss. I hope you’re able to recover it.
