Drive Cloning Mishaps

I just accidentally deleted a 1,5 TB chunk of files I'd been moving from a bunch of smaller/older drives onto one larger one, and late night decided to clone onto another drive the same size. For posterity.

I can't say for certain if I somehow accidentally put the drives in the wrong slots, copying the empty drive to the source drive, or if something just went horrible wrong with the cloning process... but whatever happened it definitely went horribly wrong! Opening up the drives today I'm greeted with two identical, and EMPTY drives! Identical drive signatures (that's easy to fix though - just go through disk management and hit the 'offline' notice to fix it - hopefully this wasn't the fix that somehow started this nightmare) aaand identically barren wasteland. Nothing there. Zilch. Nada. Stereotypical synonyms on nothing end burst.

This comes at the end of a few weeks spent backing up files, just in case, and has me realizing two things. Firstly: If you decide to clone a drive, it's best to have a backup of that drive somewhere safe already, because the clone process might in fact impact BOTH drives - not just the additional one. And secondly: I don't really need this particular chunk of data.

It still stings though. I'm running a shallow Recuva scan on one of the drives I copied files FROM - to which I've unfortunately copied new files to after, and running a deep scan on the now empty source drive, hoping that everything will still miraculously be there, just hidden away by the new partition index.

A shallow scan didn't work though. It recovered files that had been previously deleted on the OTHER drive, which had been cloned to this one, so I'm not certain this attempt will do much good either. It's currently running on two hours, with three more to go, so it's still a while left until I find out. Fingers crossed. UPD: Didn't work. Fingers uncrossed.

But it makes you think a bit. About files. About what files you really need. About if all this time you spend copying files to/from and between locations is really worth it... also knowing that a fire or similar freak occurrence could easily wipe away the entirety of these files regardless. Backups or no.

I need to get some backups to a different location, but cloud backup's expensive for large amounts of data, and I don't have that great bandwidth either way. Leaving a copy with a friend is an idea but I'm paranoid by nature, so I'm currently reading up on encryption too. Not that I don't trust my friends, I just don't trust my friends to be paranoid by nature.

So for now I'm backing up locally, and backing up certain selections of smaller files online, and pondering additional backup strategies. Also currently thinking about all that time. All that drive, poured into these drives; so easily dead; so messily revived. Just like my bike.

Not that I ever could revive my bike. Not without a little more alchemy practice. Alchemy drive recovery? Hmm! Unconventional anime spin-off ideas...