Losing A Lifetime of Work

About 8 months ago I switched to Linux from Windows 10. Shortly thereafter, the hard drive that contained practically all of my photos, graphics, and other pictures — nearly two decades and 100 GB — stopped responding.

Initially, I thought accessing the Windows drive from Linux messed it up. In fact, up until about a week ago, I thought that was still the case. Content my files were still safe, I didn’t rush to recover them, though it had become very inconvenient. AuDHD does what AuDHD does.

The problem wasn’t Linux or Windows. The problem was the drive had catastrophically failed at the hardware level. Unlike software and other write errors, a hardware failure is a physical failure of the drive. No amount of software is going to allow access to the information on the drive. To recover the data, the drive needs to be physically opened up and the offending parts of its hardware (i.e., circuit controllers) replaced.

This is not cheap.

Any data security specialist will tell you, you should have your important data backed up in three different locations. I had previously backed up this data on Proton Drive. For no rational reason I can recall, I had deleted my backup. I had the data backed up on our local cloud drive, I had deleted the backup.

Looking back on it, the only explanation I can give at this point is that I was in the midst of grieving the loss of my grandmother who had just passed and that, combined with my other challenges, resulted in a really poor reasoning decision at the time to remove backups.

I had scoured every inch of my storage to see if I could find a backup of the data, before finally deciding to look into a quote for professional data restoration — and I knew from AI it wasn’t going to be cheap. Estimates ranged anywhere from $200-$1000. Yeah.

Finally, I decided to take one last ditch effort with Proton. It doesn’t auto-delete trash, but it also doesn’t allow me to search it. This means there were nearly 15,000 files in the trash that I had to search through manually.

I searched the files manually.

After having cleared out mostly junk, I arrived at practically the end… and there it was. Two backups. One from when I backed it up from our local cloud drive and one from when I backed it up from my hard drive.

The files were found.

Praise God.

I can’t begin to express how many hundreds or even thousands of hours of irreplaceable work was in those files, from decades of graphic design, collection, and other sources which could not be replaced.

I lost a part of my life. I found it again.

The Lord has done great things for us; we are glad.

Psalm 126:3

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