This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/datahoarder by /u/Kended on 2024-11-06 06:59:21+00:00.

Well it finally happened to me. I was manually cleaning up an odd temporary file I found in one of my YouTube channel directories that I archive, and I carelessly used the “rm” command without thinking about what it would do.

The command ran for a couple seconds, and there I sat thinking “Oh no, why is it taking so long.”. Then after a quick ls command, the panic set in and I realized I deleted now mostly missing and unretrievable content.

I froze for a minute and thought about the best way to recover, test disk, raid, whatever, and then quickly remembered my mirror drives that my main data drives rsync to once a week. There was about 5 minutes where I carefully double checked all the commands I was entering, and then BAM! Rsync got to work on restoring my deleted directory from my backup drives.

Those backups run once a week via rsync, and have been doing so for about a year now, never once being used or even thought about, until today when I finally REALLY needed them.

All this to say, always have a backup of any data you care about. I know most of us here don’t need another lesson on their importance, but I hope my short story can serve as a lesson on how critical they really are for us in this hobby. I know having a mirror backup saved my data this time, and hopefully it’ll continue to do so in the future.

EDIT: I did recover my data thanks to the backup drives. I was able to use Rsync to copy the deleted channel from a backup that the main drives back up to once a week.