I just discovered something I did so idiotic I need a stronger adjective that what is in my name.

For one of my installs, I accidentally overwrote my 1TB HDD. A few minutes ago I wanted to put back some files… and all I saw was a distro.

It confused me because I was not sure if I was on my solid state drive or the HDD.

So, those files are gone. A lot is gone. Nothing too precious, I think… It might be a tremendous fuck up.

See kids, this is why you back up. Off the computer. Oh well.

EDIT: Recovering files using Photorec. Everyone who recommended this to me is a hero. Also a hero is the person who recommended FTK, but I was too eager to use something now than to sign up to download. I still should though…

    • Starbuck@lemmy.world
      8·
      1 year ago

      Unless it was encrypted, it prob doesn’t matter. The partition table is just the road map that points to the houses (files). A tool like FTK or PhotoRec goes byte by byte to find the files and figure out what they are. You won’t have file names, but the data might still be there.

      • DidacticDumbass@lemmy.oneOPEnglish
        6·
        1 year ago

        I got it running now! I did not have that much to recovery, so everything will fit in home. Mostly word files, PDFs, and pictures. Few movies and music.

    • static-dragon@lemmy.zip
      5·
      1 year ago

      Oh, I’ve nuked partitions in the past before, and was able to recover using photorec, when doing it, just make sure you don’t save the files to the drive you’re running recovery on

    • Starbuck@lemmy.world
      3·
      1 year ago

      Also, all of us have done things because we didn’t know better. The only dumb thing to do here is to not learn how to fix this. Try and fail, so next time you know how it works and can do better.

      • DidacticDumbass@lemmy.oneOPEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Thank you! This is just my way of laughing at the situation. I am definitely learning some new skills like data recovery and critical thinking.