I partitioned a drive on win 7 and was happy to have a kid drive of 25MB, didn't think much of it.
Later the PC couldn't turn on for some reason. My dad's friend came over and being an expert in XP decided to install that, wiped the C: drive and installed it. The drive with the kid, E: drive just showed as a blob, data was never recovered.
We lost all our childhood pics backed up in that drive and my dad is specially very sensitive about it but he didn't scold me once.
I still bear the scars of that fateful day and probably forever will.

Now that I know more about computers and self host, I'm doing the 3-2-1 backup rule, still get the temptation to hand over google all the photos just so they don't get lost again.

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Had an old drive once that started getting corrupted over time. Figured I'd try and avoid that with a better setup when I upgraded my PC, so I bought 2 expensive enterprise-grade drives and pooled them as a mirrored ReFS volume using Storage Spaces in Win10.
This setup lasted me years without issues until I upgraded my monitor and a friend pestered me into trying Win11 since he claimed Win10 had shit HDR support. I hated Win11 at the time already, but relented and made a small partition for it on my main drive, just to test it.
Booted the PC, created a new user, everything seemed to work just fine. Then I booted back into Win10. Surprise surprise, I could no longer access my Storage Spaces volume. Turns out the mere action of booting Win11 automatically upgraded the ReFS version of my volume, despite not touching ANY of the data, and now Win10 couldn't read it anymore.
Panicked and did some stupid shit to try and split the volume (figured I'd keep one half for Win11 to read and format the other as NTFS, copy everything back over - since it was 2 mirrored drives I don't see why this should be so hard?) but ended up irreversibly corrupting something so that both drives were unreadable. 12TB of data down the drain, including my music collection full of rare releases I could probably never find again.
Fortunately I was able to run UFS Explorer on it overnight and it recovered basically everything intact, including directory structures etc., but it still scared the absolute shit out of me.
To this day I still haven't recovered everything off that drive - I just want a stable resilient filesystem that I can mirror 2 drives with on Windows.

Look it up in the archives. I lost like 300TB

>Late at night, tired as a dog, eyes are barely open
>USB pen drive has errors when copying the mp3s I listen to when going work in car
>use gparted to format it
>barely notice the size is 500GB instead of 500MB before hitting Apply
>it was the 500GB data hdd with all the few old photos I had
>gave a try with a couple of data recovery software but didn't got back what I wanted more
>I'm not doing backup because I have no more data to lose

>>107253409
I have an sdcard with a dead person's recipes and a dead ssd with pictures of my dead gf. Its just I'll try to get around to it stuff in my drawers

>>107253409
lost few gigs of porn some times ago, the weirdest part is its the only data disappear.
was trying do install win10 on a linux machine (didn't succeed because win10 installer is fucking trash)

>>107253409
had an external drive that i was not exactly careful with when i was 18. had a bunch of music on it. one time i moved it and dropped it from like 5 mm above a table and it died.
made some noises but could never spin up properly.
never fully trusted hard disks ever since.
ssd was a welcome change.

I formatted the family computer when I was a child because I thought /dev/sda was the flash drive and I was fucking with one of those Gusty Gibbon live cds they used to send you in the mail. Parents took turns beating me with their belts then took the power cable away from the computer for 6 months. They had their taxes mostly done on the computer and this was pre cloud saving so they lost them all and had to redo them before the deadline. Yes I am brown.

Maybe 8 or 10 years old. Commodore 64

Lost all the Chip's Challenge progress. Devastating, traumatic. Vowed to never again allow such a thing.

early 1990s. had an iomega tape drive in my pc. used a 3-deep system: 1 tape backed up every week, 1 every month, 1 every 3 months. even tested backups to be sure they were good.
got lax about testing them after a while. hdd finally failed. got new hdd, went to backup tapes... none of them worked. lost data for everything i did in college and several years afterwards at work.

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>>107253409
Lost my 4chan folder 2011 to 2014, can't remember how.

Probably lost some rare Dolans that are worth a lot now.

>>107253409
I need a the rapist that looks like that.

>>107253759
fuck...

>transfer user data to new ssd
>everything's good
>wipe original disc
>go to make a new backup
>new ssd suddenly died, only a couple days old
>lost everything

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>>107253409
>attempt to restore windows 7 partition from backup
>second partition was modified at some point
>notice the grayed out box which says to repartition the drive
>proceed anyway
>windows repartitions the drive and wipes the second partition in the process
>slightly confused as to why my retardation caused data loss
>give recuva a try
>recover most of my shit, incidentally up to the last defragmentation
>everything else gets dumped into a folder, part pf which was unrecoverable
About 400GB of data recovered. 6GB with random names w/o folder structure and 2GB corrupted. Not too bad. Most of the unrecovered stuff was some game files which I redownloaded and some porn. Lesson learned, never disregard a grayed out box with a checkmark on it.

>>107257627
Forgot to say that before I ran Recuva, I modified the partition table the way it was before I fucked it up. My backup had a slightly bigger C drive. What I fucked up had a smaller C drive. Thankfully I knew its size to the actual byte.

In 2005, got my grandpa's PC a year after he died, it was a couple years old. I decided after a few months that because it's mine, despite sharing it with my mom, I can open it up and learn about the components. I don't know how that thing ended up surviving for 6 years in our household. I once took the heatsink/fan off the CPU because I had never seen one before. When it was time to put it back on, I used my finger to mash the thermal paste back toward the center and figured it's good enough, lmao.

Anyway, I tried to hotswap my IDE main drive, and when I went to connect the molex connector, when it got close to the pins, there was a loud spark. The drive didn't work after that and we had to go a few days without until my mom got a shitty old drive from a friend. When I told her the computer was down that morning, she had a mental breakdown and actually started crying over not being able to play one of the Windows XP card games before work, lol. She did not take up my offer to play Halo CE or 2, or GTA: San Andreas instead.

>>107257844
Oh, I also thought I had lost my fap folder earlier today and got to learn how to use hashcat. I normally password a 7z archive with a combination of some of the 16-character passwords I use, but the combo didn't work this time. I even tried some passwords on their own, the common ones, and it didn't work. I had to make a dictionary .txt file by entering all of my passwords into a combination generator and copying the lists it gave. Then to get hashcat to crack a 7z file, there was a Perl script to extract a hash from it to be cracked. I got my result and what the fuck, it was my most common single password that I had tried a few times before without revealing it to check for spelling mistakes.

But it's good now, my Asian cum slut collection is safe and accessible.

>>107253409
Lost my very first minecraft world due to a dead hdd :(

i lost her nudes and my music collection

>>107253409
I thought i was being clever
bottom half of 19, windows just again force updated through my rectum and installed their spyware interanally.

Never again i resolved, the updates couldn't install themselves if there wasn't any harddrive space to place it in- so i filled my harddrive up to the brim.
it worked for awhile, satisfied with myself i ignored the update button.
but after several days it happened-
despite having now harddrive space it attempted to write itself to my disk, corrupting all my data, destroying the oss

>>107253409
>highschool laptop
>win7
>at school
>somehow corrupt MBR
>not sure what to do, reboot it
>see option in bios for network boot
>try it out
>literacy check fails
>it reinstalled windows
>all user data is gone
Don't recall much of what was lost, but I do remember being miffed that some midis I was putting together were gone. Thankfully a lot of it was also on the family PC.

>>107253409
Every so often Ill waddle down to the office building nearby and see how far I can get without being called out.

One time I snuck in at 9AM with a group of three employees and then I used scissors to cut random wires from a server rack.

I am a black hat.

My old HDD croaked about a year ago. That thing lasted about 10 years though, and I used it daily.
It's hard to remember what was on there, but for sure it had a lot of old documents from school and some emulated ROMs that I can't find anymore.

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>>107253409
>be 12-14 y/o
>no concept of backing up data
>keep absolutely everything in a 8 GB USB stick (MS Paint drawings, games I coded, emulators, image collections, etc.)
>one day I plug the USB stick in my computer class' PC and it doesn't work
>panic in silence
>professor offers to help
>30 min. later, he gives me back the fixed USB
>plug in, completely formatted
In retrospect it wasn't that much of a data loss, but when you're that young you feel like your whole life has gone to the drain. It hurts that I don't have the source code to my first games ever. I've become a Syncthing freak and discovered git since.

Bonus:
>be 20 y/o
>my task manager is some shitty CLI + MySQL DB I put together
>aunt gets surgery and I offer to be with her in the hospital for 3 days
>need to work remotely so without thinking much I port forward the IP of my MySQL server
>no root password, lol
>unsurprisingly, after 1 day I get my database wiped and left with a message that says "please gib 0.5 BTC saar or else"
I lost like 2 years data, but it was kind of worthless.

>laptop
>external HDD
>reposition laptop to go to the bathroom
>external suddenly no workie no more
>lost 2 years worth of vBulletin forum skin coding
it hurt for a while, a longggg while

i was playedering project zomboid the other night and my power went out (snowstorm) :(

>>107253853
>proceeds to download the same playlist in roughly 15 secs but in lossless
now that you realize you never looked at those photos, you are free to live in the moment. Data hoarding made sense when data was precious and scarce, in the age of digital slop what is there to cherish? Treat your data like cattle, not pets. In fact, treat your data like bugs and perhaps you will have a chance to repel ai sloppu. In fact, don't even @me, I'm a bot

>>107253409
kept alot of pics i took my last two years of highschool in 2012/2013 on a dropbox account and i went to long without accessing it and they deleted the account and also im pretty sure i forgot the password anyways so there was no way to go through thier recovery thing. it was very stupid for me to have data on thier as my only copy was i was a techlet then

>>107253735
pain.

also when i was in highschool i didint have my own pc so i used my ps3s web browser for youtube,browsing the net and posting on forums and myspace so i kept alot of memes and random shit stored on the ps3 and then the ps3 YLOD during a game of modern warfare 2, this was in like 2010/11, the ps3 harddrives are encrypted and can only be unlocked by the original console they belong to, so you cant just pull the drive off and use a pc to access files and you cant just put it in another ps3 and have it work like that the drive would be have to be initialized as a new one for a new console

>>107253409
Not long ago I was deleting partitions off of a rogue drive that was misbehaving. Get denied and have to fuck around trying to override it. Realize half way through blowing away the 3rd one that i'm deleting my backups. Wonderful. Go get my other drive to restore and spend the next day restoring all of my shit. I'm fucking retarded.

>Install a game to the root of C:
>Uninstall it
>Restart
>???

My first time wtith a computer and Windows 95

>>107253409
In early 2024, I had a Skyrim 600 mod modlist on Mod manager 2 and then a lot of music an downloads and old games in the same 2 tb external HHD, one time while playing a quest mod inside it, I accidentally hit the HDD and it dropped by 1 inch. It then decided to die and not load anymore and I couldn't salvage the HDD no matter what. I had to buy a 1 th ssd immediately and redownload all the Skyrim mods to rebuild my setup from scratch and then transfer all my music from my local drive to the new Ssd and it took 5 days to fully restore everything to the correct data again but on the new harddrive but I had to redownload a lot. The moral of the story is to buy external Ssd rather than HDD.

>>107253409
my USB stick has Windows installation media with autounattend.xml contains command "diskpart clean all"

I used this stick to copy some files and forgot to unplug.

during next reboot boot order selected this usb for boot and diskpart wiped all my data.
there is no way to restore any data after.
it was year ago

now i have 3 copies of everything. hot copy on ssd and two cold copies on two different hdds

I only care about my code and my code is on github.

>>107253409
my brother invited his buddy to our home, and that fucker stole my hdd.

Had Warframe destroy my 4tb HDD when it did that trim stuff
I lost so much

>>107253409
my little brother once saved over my Pokemon Emerald file where I had a lvl 100 Blaziken or some shit and I was really pissed about that