Epic tech fail... Double Facepalm is ENTIRELY Insufficient

[Greg]

Oh, my. Just oh my. It's no help, but I can appreciate the magnitude of the disaster, and I sympathize.

[Termite]

Exactly how does one do that........accidentally?

[arctictom]

Been there and have had that done to me as well , at my vintage and level of scarring I keep backups in safe deposit box in another state , yup mail pen drives to a friend , and he places them puts new ones in quarterly .
I definitely feel your pain, so can critical stuff be recreated ?

[Netpackrat]

Crap. Friend of mine recently lost his laptop. And for a while, couldn't recall the password for his encrypted backup. Was facing the loss of data going back to about 1992, when he was finally able to come up with the password after several days.

[Jericho941]

Ooooh, ouch. Yeah, bad news never ages well, but... yeah. Ouch.

[randy]

Awww Shit! Sorry doesn't seem adequate, but all I can offer.

[Termite]

Exactly how does one do that........accidentally?

Thus my statement above "negligently".

The factory reset routine includes a "wipe all disks" option... 2 drives in the machine, plus backup drive attached by USB.

So not just deleted, totally over-written.

Ouch...........

See, Chris's misfortune is just one more reason that when I buy my own laptop, it will be MY laptop, and no one, I repeat NO ONE else in the family is gonna use it.

[skb12172]

Plenty of lessons from this. I'm sure Mel feels horrible. I know Chris does. So, how can the rest of us learn from this? I'm wondering if one of those 1 Terabyte backup drives, not to be touched by anyone but me, would be the way to go.

[JustinR]

Ouch, ouch, ouch.

Do you know if it actually did a low level format of the drives, or is there any chance of sending one of the drives to an expensive data recovery service?

[Rich]

Ouch, Bummer.

Just how critical is that data Chris? I mean other than things like the Guncounter. Really, other than medical data and legal data about the daughters, you should be able to recover, and you can partially recover data from your doctors and lawyers. Lotsa work, but it can be done.

I'm thinking about taking an old computer and making a NAS box out of it by installing a couple of large HDD's and the appropriate OS. But then I only have four computers and a tablet to worry about.