entry15

[ironicbadger]

I'm relatively young so this was somewhat recent (year 2015-2018 not exactly sure when)... Once upon a time long before I got into hosting my own servers (virtual and storage) I used to put all of my data (pictures, movies, software, etc.) on external hard drives. I had about 6 500GB external drives and one massive 5TB external drive. I used the 5TB disk as my primary source where it was always connected to my laptop and painstakingly would manually copy data over to the smaller drives in case my primary failed me. Long story short I ended up building my very first NAS with FreeNAS as the OS using an old computer and old 2tb drives. By that time I had thrown away the smaller 500G drives thinking they were useless to anyone and I didn't want anyone to recover my data and only kept my 5TB drive as now my secondary backup. I used a raspberry pi to be able to schedule backups to the 5TB drive from FreeNAS so I can have a peace of mind as my "NAS" was barely standing. Long story short I ended up wanting to sell my 5tb drive so I wiped it (or so I thought) on eBay. After it had sold I shipped it and didn't hear from buyer for some time (Ill get to this in a bit) - I think about 2 months go by and I now was in the process of upgrading my NAS and using my newly built NAS I decided to rsync over everything with the --delete option from old to new.... I wrote the command backwards and deleted everything from my old nas (all of my data)... I don't recall if I had snapshots configured or even knew what that was at the time all I knew was all those years of collecting whatever data I had such as family photos, software, files, documents, etc. was now gone! I believe a few days later I get a message from the buyer of my hard drive that the hard drive either didn't work or for some other reason he wanted to return it. I gladly accepted the return, but was now stuck with a drive that I had thought I had formatted (maybe 20-30 times full format). I ended up finding this tool called "photorec" and what it does it takes an image of the disk and it'll look through it's "blocks of data" and try to recover anything from it. By my surprise and utter shock I was able to recover almost all of my photos and some videos (old family photos with no other backup in existence), as well as some other data that was on that disk. I couldn't believe my eyes and was shocked this was even possible until I learned that nothing is really ever deleted! Anyways I now operate and maintain a well built TrueNAS server as well as off site backups to make sure I never lose any data again! Phew!

This 10TB drive would be beyond perfect to have as It would allow for more than enough mission critical data to be archived and stored off site (parents house haha) in the event of some catastrophic event. I also host a few servers with proxmox for quite a bit of my self hosting tools and "simulated environments" for testing out software and whatever else interests me. My love for computers and data has stuck with me hard every since my incident and I have grown a lot in both knowledge and awareness!

TLDR - Always be sure to have multiple copies of your data on Encrypted disks :)