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I have 3 stories related to file recovery and backup. 1. Friend's HDD A friend told me a story about how their backup HDD was wiped a few years before I was hired. They were so annoyed that they didn't want to see the HDD anymore. So they kept it in their drawer without ever touching it. When they heard somehow that data from a reformatted HDD can be retrieved, they asked me about it and I said I could give it a try. When I got my hands on the HDD, I noticed that the partition was called something like "LG Smart TV". I am guessing that TV didn't like the format of HDD and decided that it was obligated to fix it. I pulled a bunch of crap from that HDD and put retrieved files on a few SD-cards. After all, neither my computer's SSD had enough storage nor I wanted to keep their stuff. It was mostly a successful recovery. I found a few pirated movies, which thanks to file fragmentation became a funny mishmash movie where one scene suddenly jumps to another from an unrelated movie and back, with few scenes filled with green artifacts, those similar to ones we used to have on scratched CDs. It was unwatchable, and my friend moved onto Netflix during that time anyway. 2. Friend's family HDD Another friend who heard that file could be recovered from a ticking HDD called me after their HDD stopped ticking. Apparently, their HDD was no longer appearing on "My PC" on Windows. After some more talk on the phone, I realized that their old rusty spinner finally kicked the bucket. Since the spinner and read/write head were dead, they needed to take it to a professional recovery centre, which would cost them around a thousand dollar. Alternatively, they could buy a new HDD and pull their latest backup. That HDD was their backup. He neither had the money for professional recovery, nor another backup. Everything from their marriage to children's childhood videos and photos were gone. 3. The day I wiped my SSD It was a normal day in the life of a regular Linux distro hopper, yours thoroughly. As a distro jumper on a budget, I had a main SSD which had my main distro that I never touch and a USB that I use for testing distros. On that faithful day, Somehow installation targeted my main SSD rather the USB drive. I realized that after booting into the freshly installed OS and seeing how much free space it had. "How come my USB stick appears as big as my SSD?" I thought, before realizing what had just happened. Thankfully, I had an encrypted backup on my B2 bucket, which I downloaded immediately. I have been annoying people about the importance of having backups ever since. I wrote a blog post about that it. https://murtezayesil.me/i-wiped-my-ssd-by-accident/