Rest in Peace · 3:54pm Sep 16th, 2017
Yesterday evening, my desktop's hard drive suffered sudden and complete failure. I am now declaring it officially bricked.
It's what I get for installing onto an early-model, off-brand, second-hand solid state drive. The thing that gets me is that I had just been planning to put together a backup external HDD – which is probably the jinx that invoked the failure.
Now, how exactly did it fail? No computer that I have access to will recognize that the drive even exists in the BIOS, let alone after booting into an operating system. I might as well be plugging in a clay brick (it'd just use less power). I have tried all available means to revive it even for a moment to pull any data off, but it remains totally dead. A proper replacement is already on its way, as is the external USB casing for one of my spare HDDs for a full backup device.
As it is, having as many random devices as I do (one being a laptop that I use regularly), a lot of the data has been duplicated on one device or another anyway, so losses are primarily limited to a few folders of relatively unimportant screenshots and local game data. I've probably truly lost only 5-10% of what was on that SSD. I suppose I can remove the "sync device files" item from my near-future to-do list.
I totally borrowed the blog post title from this comment on FanOfMostEverything's blogs on his recent experience with a similar problem.
Glad to hear your net loss is a lot less worse than mine. Still, my condolences.
Good to hear that most of your data is duplicated. Is KSP's data synced with the Steam cloud by default?
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It is not even an option, but I was considering a new game anyway.
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Thanks. As it happens, I realize that I may be able to make 1:1 backups fairly easily for both of my PCs – having two spare HDDs – periodically updating them manually with a command resembling this:
sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=4k
The only question is if I can make the larger one hold a backup on one half and act as an additional external filespace with the other half. I hope this works in general, because then I can reinstall the OS by cloning my laptop and tweaking like three things (I'm really glad I ordered the external casing now).