[sydmalicious]

I have had to uproot my life several times over the last four years and in that time, I have made sure to be careful with the hard drives and backups I use so that no data is lost or corrupted.

Unfortunately we can't always control circumstances and that has happened to me. My uncle and his friend graciously took all my stuff to storage for me; I don't drive. The issue is they are older (80+) and do not understand that spinning disks are fragile, and tossed them into a plastic tub.

Got to where I am currently and two drives, a 6 TB and 12 TB drives that were working well before they threw them in the container are dead. I expected the 12 TB to die as it was making clicking sounds but the 6TB one is brutal.

This means I've lost multiple terabytes of data. I run servers, or I did, and now that I am in a motel room, I have no access to that stuff as most of the books and media I had were stored on local servers through Proxmox. I was paying for Backblaze but stopped after money got really tight.

I would be distraught- old photos and documents are on that 12 TB drive however I have a NAS that has a backup service on it, and when that 12TB drive was dying I made sure to copy the majority of that drive to my NAS.

At first I felt sick about it, but it just reminded me that:

a. local copies of things, whether on your own network/homelab are only as good as the internet you have and the place you are living. If you can't have a homelab for a while, it is best to use something like Pikapods for critical services. This way your data is always available.

b. life comes at you fast so that $9/mo for Backblaze is a must. I can't go without it again lest I lose everything without recourse.

Do you have any nightmarish scenarios you've had to deal with, overcome, or recover from?