The Scariest Loading Screen Of All Time...

[Taylor Martin]

The power went out for .0001 seconds, but it was enough time for my 8 terabyte external hard drive to shut off. It got corrupted on my Mac, but thankfully I formatted it to exFat, which means I can go between Mac and Windows.

Booted up the hard drive on my windows computer and repaired it, though I didn't know if I'd just lost 2 terabytes worth of stuff (some of which I've been working on now). Had I lost that, I would've been incredibly devastated and likely given up doing things for the next week.

Remember kids, it's always important to have a backup... unless that backup decides to crap out on you... then it's always important to pray.

EDIT: The loading screen says "scanning and repairing, which was a shot in the dark to get all my junk back.

[ttyymmnn]

@taylor-martin When I was in grad school, I worked at the music department computer lab. We had a saying: "There are two kinds of users: those have lost data, and those who will lose data." I lost thousands of air show photos a few years ago when an external drive shit the bed. It was the only time I've ever seen and photographed an A-4 Skyhawk. Gone.

On the advice of counsel (RustyVandura), I switched to a networked mirrored 2TB drive. It sits in its only little case, and if one of the drives freaks out it actually sets off an alarm. That makes me feel at least a little bit safer.

Best of luck with that.

[Taylor Martin]

@ttyymmnn I had my lost data moment years ago when I made gaming YouTube videos (yeah, I was one of those kids, but it was fun). I had been editing a video for 12 hours straight, and it was a masterpiece. The comedy was golden, the editing smooth, the effects magnificent (I put tons of time into those old videos). I shut down the computer and went to bed filled with pride.

I woke up the next day to upload the video, but upon booting it up, the Mac displayed a screen I'd never seen before. Turns out I'd done so much editing that I fried the disk drive (granted, the computer was 6 years old by the time I got to it, but still). The whole thing had to be wiped, a whole new hard drive was put in, and the video I'm most proud of to this date was gone, never to be seen by anyone but me...

I'm getting all sad thinking about it now... but oh well. Live and learn. I've never heard of a networked mirrored hard drive. I just like to unplug the drive when I'm done using it. This time around I just so happened to be using it when the power cut.

[rctothefuture]

Good luck on the recovery. UPS's are a god send on any important backup.

[ttyymmnn]

@taylor-martin When I was in grad school, I was putting the finishing touches on a fairly long and involved musical analysis. I finished proofing it then deleted two extra carriage returns at the bottom because I'm anal. However, the entire paper somehow got selected, I deleted the whole thing, and it was in the days before multiple undo. I had to start over again....(sad trombone)

[Taylor Martin]

@rctothefuture Recovery went off without a hitch! I had to do some switching between my Mac and Windows computer, but it all came back. Thank goodness for exFat files.

[jminer]

@ttyymmnn I upload all my photos to 2 cloud providers and have them on a server in the basement. My organization is still terrible though so I have a hell of a time finding that photo I'm looking for.

[Taylor Martin]

@ttyymmnn Oh sheesh. It's one thing to lose something you worked on for fun. It's another thing to lose something you absolutely had to do (i.e. school). Sad trombone indeed.

[ttyymmnn]

@jminer Once I started using Lightroom, my organizational process got significantly better.

[Jawzx2]

@taylor-martin everything just needs to get over itself and use EXT4.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext4

Sony uses EXT4 on Playstation as it is almost immune to corruption (something you want in a consumer electronics device)

[RallyDarkstrike]

I use an ancient but competent (if you know how it works) Java-based program called JFileSync to sync files between my Linux laptop, Windows 10 desktop and my Linux Media Center PC. It's a bit clunky and has to be run manually, but if you set it up correctly, it will sync everything from one computer to the others to exactly the same directory on each machine....I've not found anything that quite works the same way. A plus is, as it is Java-based (as much as I hate Java)...it can run on Linux/Mac/Windows and is therefore 100% cross-platform!

In other words, my other computers ARE my backup hard drives.

[Jb boin]

While EXTFAT is indeed a bad idea if you want a safe filesystem (no journaling among other things), ext4 doesn't seem to be natively supported on MacOS which might also be a bad idea.

[RallyDarkstrike]

@jb-boin EXT4 isn't supported natively on Windows either AFAIK.

[Jb boin]

@rallydarkstrike seems like it is since one of the last Windows update with Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2), i don't have dual boot on my main computer so i didn't give it a look but it's a good idea to fire up the laptop that i almost never use anymore

[RallyDarkstrike]

Yes, I wrote about that but no nothing about it! It's mostly for just basic command line stuff isn't it?

[sn4cktimes]

I'm so far out of date on computer stuff these days... When I was a kid (pre-2k's) I used to assemble and setup computer systems for my Dad's company. I got tired of doing multiple backups of our home system all the time and setup a 3 disk RAID array. So I always had all the same data spun up on multiple disk at the same time. This was pre high-speed internet, so offsite storage wasn't really a thing unless you were willing to physically pop a drive and walk it to the neighbours house...

[RallyDarkstrike]

@sn4cktimes I started to get into them proper in the early 2000s.

[sn4cktimes]

And me leaving for university was when I started to get out of them. While building systems we would regularly sell our system (clean install) so there were large segments of my life where I had a new computer every week. And often had 2-6 going on at any time. We had little monitor and keyboard hubs for three stations that could each swap between 2 towers. It was ridiculous for a while in the late 90’s

[Rusty Vandura]

@ttyymmnn There are people in our community who see this as a dated approach...