<- Home

Military service ends in a few months (January 2025). I'll be back online soon.

I started planning what to work on first when I return. That meant going through old backups and emails.

The disaster

My important online backup server expired while I was at base. I forgot the renewal date, had no way to check, and the host deleted everything. Years of private projects, side projects, code I never pushed publicly: gone forever.

Fine, I have local backups.

Except the backup drive has bad sectors. Half the data is corrupted. The rest I recovered with PhotoRec and TestDisk, but it's all mixed together: ~40 GiB of text files, HTML fragments, gzipped archives, and who knows what else. No directory structure, no filenames that make sense.

The plan

I know what I'm doing first when service ends: a painful, tedious journey to sort through 40 GiB of recovered data and salvage what I can.

This is why you test your backups. This is why you have multiple backups. This is why you set calendar reminders for server renewals.

I failed all three.

Lesson learned. The hard way.