I just lost an ssd. Was browsing the net and firefox froze up, so habitually I pressed the x button. When that didn't work, I moved onto ctrl-alt-t to pull up a terminal and pkill firefox. No dice on opening the terminal, X must have froze; ctrl-alt-F1. Typed in username and my screen spewed errors. Uh-oh.
Typed in my password and ctrl-alt-F[what ever number X is by default in ubuntu] to check to see if anything unfroze. Everything had froze at this point, not even my touchpad wanted to work. To that I responded to a held press on my power button and rebooted. And then coreboot refused to 'discover' my ssd. As such a micro linux install on my nand chip was booted and the terminal greeted me with: "ata1 COMRESET error=-16" or something like that. Logged into my firmware, ls /dev ; alas no sda was to be found. So I poweroff'd and plugged in a live usb of mint. It booted and gave me the same result, no ssd to mount, not even in read-only.
So, in the end I'm without a doubt missing some important stuff (Like a case # for warranty service on a different laptop) and pretty dang sad that I lost my riced lock screen. I'm sure this will leave me annoyed in the months to come, as I struggle to think of what I don't have a copy of thats important.
In the end, other than this story of fail, I guess I have to say, "Did you backup your data today?" Not sure what I'm going to do now, but I guess I can boot an OS off a usb disk for now... Such a pain though. Hopefully it decides it wants to boot tomorrow so I can atleast grab some important stuff...
When was the last time you lost important data, and what did you do? Alternatively, when was the last time you backed up your data, and how much do you value it? (Also appologies for any bad formatting/punctual errors; typing on an ipod is a rather lethargic process...)
I do an incremental backup every 15 minutes when I am at home (when I am away, it backs up locally every 2 hours then waits until it sees my network to upload to my big drives) . I then have certain directories I REALLY WANT backed up (I don't really care about backing up movies/audio unless I've made them). Those go on my http://rsync.net plan. I use xfsdump for my snapshots. It's nice and can be incremented easily.
I love the age of Google Drive. I used to keep redundant externals and servers of redundant externals and servers. Nowadays much anything I need is kept online. Documents, movies, and files on drive, music in Play. There's not much else I need backed up. I keep images of my computers on my work server, so I suppose if I ever leave this job, I'd have to migrate those over elsewhere, but then again 60% of my computers are owned by this job, so it wouldn't be that big an issue.
Oh no, I absolutely have multiple google accounts with things, and there's tons of overlap between computers on truly important things. I just feel safe enough that I have the original copy on a computer and a backup on Google. There isn't usually much more need for things for me anymore, and I cleared out a ton of tech clutter over the years because of it.
I back up every few days. I have a Mac, and Time Machine in OS X makes it so easy. I actually take it a little further and have a second backup I keep at my desk at work to reduce the chance of catastrophic loss. I update that weekly. I started backing up with no horror story but did have the practice reinforced when a hard shutdown caused some data corruption. I suspect my laptop battery was failing and it stopped without warning. Restarting, programs would crash and hang up. I had a full backup only three days old and had lost nothing of significance.
I use Syncthing. So I don't do backups per-se. Rather, my server, laptop, tablet, and phone all keep a folder synchronised, which has all my non-media data (all my media is on online services). It's about a gigabyte. It's easier than regular backups, more redundant than on-site, and if I lose my server, laptop, phone, and tablet, I have bigger problems.
I have an in-house SAN that runs RAID6 holding all my data; I can lose two drives and still have it all. This is mostly downloaded youtube nonsense and a about a TB of music. I'll be sad if I lose it, but life will go on. Vital data is stored in a paid Dropbox account (encrypted tax forms, picts of all my credit cars, my mortgage and insurance info etc). My will is in my dropbox as well as my parent's. If I die suddenly, my parents can get access to everything they need to take care of what I leave behind.
That's my secret. I don't have important data. I can clean-slate my computer at any time with only a few hours of downloading lost. Passwords, I remember them. And anything I would not like to lose (mostly ideas) are on my Google Drive account. All of the game saves that matter to me are on the SteamCloud. No pictures, no nothing. I guess if you want to be technical, it's been two days I've done a changelist on the project I'm working on.
My data from several computers/tablets/phone is constantly pushed to my nas. I also have another lesser nas that only wakes-on-lan long enough to to mirror the active nas. All are on UPS's including the network gear.
Today I tried to start my work laptop and it wouldn't. I was afraid it had completely borked. (Afraid, yet also hopeful.) No, my data wasn't backed up, and this is a great reminder. (FWIW it wasn't borked but wouldn't charge from the power cord; charged when I stuck it in a docking station. I will have to check if this is a permanent evolution, but not today, folks, not today.)
According to my laptop, it's been 57 days... I get a daily pop up to remind me that I'm being an idiot. My backup drive is currently sitting on a desk blocked by the contents of 3 closets that I had to empty, as my building is replacing pretty vital pipes that are part of the HVAC system and the piper run behind those closets. I know I should wade my way to the drive before something happens, but.......... argh. Here's what makes it even worse: I too had an SSD failure, and it was this year around March...
Ugh, I know that feeling too. Had an SSD failure on the same computer in May. Don't know why I didn't bother to have good backups. At this point though, I'm either convinced SSD technology isn't suited to my usage demands or Btrfs is the bane of all SSDs. (Or there is something terribly wrong with my chromebook, and thats why it keeps chewing through SSDs.)
If you are using brtfs (well first why are you using brtfs on a personal computer!) you should not be using brtfs, this is because the ssd stuff is always a "future featureset". It could be chewing through ssds because you aren't explitely enabling discard/trim (which are not enabled by default in brtfs) If you are looking for snapshots, I'd highly suggest xfs which is mature, and has great ssd support with awesome snapshot options.
I did have ssd support enabled though. That is what is particularly getting me annoyed. Will look into xfs, though I did find some of the features of brtfs really interesting/cool. Need a working modern computer though, so I should probably set something up to boot off of usb.
Yeah, but the ssd support does NOT enable TRIM by default sadly. (Unless you mean you added it in /etc/fstab manually in which case somethin else fishy awaits) My personal experience with brtfs has been, horrible to say the least. The important thing, as you said is getting up and runnin!
I have things I don't want to lose mirrored across 3 drives on my home PC as well as keeping a copy on a thumb drive and in the cloud. Thankfully the only things I'm worried about losing are pictures and documents so it's all fairly easy to keep backed up.
I email most things to myself across two different email accounts. This is in part so that if I want to work on something I can do it at home or at work. This is only personal data however. Work data doesn't have easy places to back up and I can't and wouldn't email it home anyway.
If people are concerned with stealing my word docs of drafted statements of purpose, unfinished poems, excel documents regarding MFA programs, and etc, then let them. I would probably get more publicity from pursuing copyright infringement actions if they made unauthorized publications of my poetry than otherwise. I mean please. Go to. Hack me for my writing. Writing, and the internet, are literally the only things I use my personal computer for. Do I consider it important data? Yes. Would anyone else on the face of the planet? Doubtful.
I can't dropbox at work. :-/ And since I do the email back-and-forth in large part to have access to things at work, it kind of negates the purpose. I mean, I could also back up on dropbox. It just wouldn't mitigate the self-emailing in any significant way.
I bought a new computer in April. So then? I had the other one for a while after that so maybe last month. The backup is on a new computer. Not the greatest idea. I've never lost anything but every time I buy a new computer it's that Samuel L. Jackson "Hold onto your butts," moment from Jurassic Park. My back ups are the closest I get to adrenaline sports. "Do I have everything? I don't know. Fuck it."
About a week ago. I upgraded to Windows 10 so did a full backup of everything. I should get in the habit of making a hard backup more often as it can so sadly be lost like in your case.
I don't even know what counts as important data for me at the moment. A while ago my laptop started circling the drain and I moved all my school work to my Google drive. I run my budget through Mint, and all of my medical stuff that I do keep is in a folder or is stored in my medical system cloud. The only thing I have on my laptop now that I would be sad to lose would be my music and movies, practically all torrented and easily recovered. Maybe I'll worry about this more once I've actually built my PC.
I don't think I've ever backed up my data, but I really want to. I got a lot of stuff, and 2 family members in my house, so I thought about taking an old PC and turning it into a backup server. I would choose an off-site solution, but I have a 2Mb upload connection, and probably hundreds of Gigabytes of data to back up. Actually, now that I think about it, I think I have a 1TB external HDD that can plug into my router in order to do the same thing. I might set that up today.