Bad Day (I'm incredibly dumb)

[SpaceNugget]

I was going to copy a live cd iso to a thumbstick, something that I have done so many times before, and accidentally typed the wrong drive and wrote over the first bit of my hard drive. Crap. Oh well, nothing has crashed yet so just make the iso and reinstall, I had just backed up my system to an external hard drive minutes ago anyway so I can recover from that on a fresh install.

 

So I reformat my thumb drive and name it zxcvb because I'm in a rush and finally copy the iso over.

 

I reboot and select my thumb drive at the boot menu, strange, its not a bootable drive. I put the thumbdrive in my GF's pc and its empty, and not named zxcvb... weird. So I do the clone from her PC and put it back in my PC. It Works! great. Install goes smoothly, get to desktop and plug in my external backup drive and my heart falls out of my chest. "what would you like to do with media 'zxcvb'".

 

I had formatted my backup to nothing immediately after backing up my pc, then wiping and reinstalling. everything is gone.

 

This sucks.

[AlwaysFSX]

Good going there.

[Beef Boss]

Welcome to the world of IT, I'll be your guide,

[chilicheeseburger]

Hope you didn't lose anything that can't be replaced.

[Alariel]

Nightmare. I don't even have words.

[SpaceNugget]

1 minute ago, chilicheeseburger said:

Hope you didn't lose anything that can't be replaced.

Some of it can and some of it can't.

[chilicheeseburger]

Just now, SpaceNugget said:

Some of it can and some of it can't.

Damn that sucks. All you can do now is learn from your mistakes. Get a NAS for your backups or at least unplug your backup drive when you're not using it. Keep an extra backup of your photos and stuff like that just in case.

[Lurick]

Did you do a real wipe of the drive with something like DBAN or just a Windows reformat?

[Hiitchy]

Don't worry, I'm in the same boat. I had a topic here about two or three months ago about an external hard drive where instead of just being patient and ordering another adapter to power the drive, I decided to use my laptop charger because it fit. Not only did I destroy the entire drive, the circuit board I ordered required me to desolder a chip from the old board and resolder it. I gave up and called it quits after realizing I'm ill equipped to be doing such a job.

 

I'm still upset about it, but I've learned that life goes on regardless. You just learn to be smarter about the things you do and take every experience as a learning tool for what it's worth. >.<

[SpaceNugget]

Just now, Lurick said:

Did you do a real wipe of the drive with something like DBAN or just a Windows reformat?

I just reformatted the external hard drive to fat32 with disks utility (i thought it was the thumb drive). the hard drive in the computer i actually wiped using dd.

[Tieox]

Pancake on head, and get a beer. 

[Beef Boss]

Just now, SpaceNugget said:

I just reformatted the external hard drive to fat32 with disks utility (i thought it was the thumb drive). the hard drive in the computer i actually wiped using dd.

Don't you pay attention to drive names...? 

[Lurick]

Just now, SpaceNugget said:

I just reformatted the external hard drive to fat32 with disks utility (i thought it was the thumb drive). the hard drive in the computer i actually wiped using dd.

If you didn't do an extended format then most of the data is probably still there on the external drive.

 

Try scanning with Recuva or another utility and see what it brings up.

[SpaceNugget]

2 minutes ago, Hiitchy said:

Don't worry, I'm in the same boat. I had a topic here about two or three months ago about an external hard drive where instead of just being patient and ordering another adapter to power the drive, I decided to use my laptop charger because it fit. Not only did I destroy the entire drive, the circuit board I ordered required me to desolder a chip from the old board and resolder it. I gave up and called it quits after realizing I'm ill equipped to be doing such a job.

 

I'm still upset about it, but I've learned that life goes on regardless. You just learn to be smarter about the things you do and take every experience as a learning tool for what it's worth. >.<

 

4 minutes ago, chilicheeseburger said:

Damn that sucks. All you can do now is learn from your mistakes. Get a NAS for your backups or at least unplug your backup drive when you're not using it. Keep an extra backup of your photos and stuff like that just in case.

Yea, This seriously sucks. 3 years of photos with my GF, and lots of important stuff like ssh keys for work that I now need to replace. between google drive and my GF probably 30-40% of them are somewhere else but more than half were just on my computer

[chilicheeseburger]

Just now, SpaceNugget said:

 

Yea, This seriously sucks. 3 years of photos with my GF, and lots of important stuff like ssh keys for work that I now need to replace. between google drive and my GF probably 30-40% of them are somewhere else but more than half were just on my computer

 Well... at least no one was hurt, right?

[Hiitchy]

Just now, SpaceNugget said:

 

Yea, This seriously sucks. 3 years of photos with my GF, and lots of important stuff like ssh keys for work that I now need to replace. between google drive and my GF probably 30-40% of them are somewhere else but more than half were just on my computer

Sorry dude. In spite of everything, I'd suggest going out and making more memories and probably getting another external drive and keeping it in a safe place, only connecting it when you really need something.

[SpaceNugget]

2 minutes ago, BadluckBrian said:

Don't you pay attention to drive names...? 

I thought I had the right one, I looked at the sizes and to figure out which name was which drive but when i went to format I guess a wire crossed in my brain or something.

[Beef Boss]

Just now, SpaceNugget said:

I thought I had the right one, I looked at the sizes and to figure out which name was which drive but when i went to format I guess a wire crossed in my brain or something.

Sorry, that came out rude from me. But like Hiitchy said, I'd recommend getting a dedicated drive for certain things like work ssh and pictures. 

[vanished]

The only advice I can offer going forward is that for this (and many other) reasons, a backup drive should be plugged in only to perform the backup, and then removed, and left unplugged most of the time.  Furthermore, when your'e doing that, just focus on doing that.  Don't try to do too many things at once, especially when they all involve moving large amounts of important data around in an unrecoverable fashion.

[Lurick]

7 minutes ago, SpaceNugget said:

Yea, This seriously sucks. 3 years of photos with my GF, and lots of important stuff like ssh keys for work that I now need to replace. between google drive and my GF probably 30-40% of them are somewhere else but more than half were just on my computer

You didn't DD the external drive so most of it's probably still there unless you write over it a few times.

[Guest]

Listen to the guy saying about how you can recover data. I think recurva was the name of one such program. It might save everything. 

[dalekphalm]

20 hours ago, SpaceNugget said:

I thought I had the right one, I looked at the sizes and to figure out which name was which drive but when i went to format I guess a wire crossed in my brain or something.

As others have said, use Recuva to scan the backup drive. If you only performed a format in Windows, the data is likely all there.

 

When Windows performs a "format", it doesn't actually overwrite the data. It just clears the partition tables, etc, so that the drive "thinks" it's empty.

 

The data isn't actually erased until another program (operating system or application, etc) starts to write over the data with new data. This can be actual real files, or in the case of Data Erasing Software, it will overwrite with "random" data that doesn't mean anything.

[Nuluvius]

This is why I have a NAS that is asymmetrically replicated to the cloud and also backed up... Nothing of any importance is kept on any client device and those devices are kept as thin as possible such that any failures result in very minimal downtime and virtually no data loss. My network is also structured in such a way as to prevent or minimise damaged from incursions or accidents.

[SpaceNugget]

11 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

As others have said, use Recuva to scan the backup drive. If you only performed a format in Windows, the data is likely all there.

 

When Windows performs a "format", it doesn't actually overwrite the data. It just clears the partition tables, etc, so that the drive "thinks" it's empty.

 

The data isn't actually erased until another program (operating system or application, etc) starts to write over the data with new data. This can be actual real files, or in the case of Data Erasing Software, it will overwrite with "random" data that doesn't mean anything.

 

 

 

I formatted it with gparted+disks utility but it took no time so I'm sure it only overwrote the partition table. Unfortunately, I can't remember if it was ext4 formatted or not. I just started running recuva on it and at 1% it has found 66775 files so far with an estimated 8 hours remaining (The shallow scan found nothing). Fingers crossed!

Edit: 77653 so far! I am trying not to get my hopes too high as I have no indication of what files it thinks it has found or if they are corrupted or anything, but it's looking up.

[Lurick]

6 hours ago, SpaceNugget said:

I formatted it with gparted+disks utility but it took no time so I'm sure it only overwrote the partition table. Unfortunately, I can't remember if it was ext4 formatted or not. I just started running recuva on it and at 1% it has found 66775 files so far with an estimated 8 hours remaining (The shallow scan found nothing). Fingers crossed!

Edit: 77653 so far! I am trying not to get my hopes too high as I have no indication of what files it thinks it has found or if they are corrupted or anything, but it's looking up.

Nice! Just remember, when it's done you need to recover them to a different drive, aka NOT the external backup drive