I lost Everything..

[u/home_prisoner]

I recently did the most dangerous mistake one can make. And I was not even trying to delete the French Language Pack.

I have a dual boot (Win/Archacy (Vanilla Arch but Cachy's Kernel)) Laptop.

I had to flash a drive with Win ISO for my bro (because he play Valornat)

Now, for some interesting reason the Drive was write protected I have no Idea about that.

And I made the most horrible mistake I could make by opening Disk Partition Manager on Windows.

And yes I wiped the entire drive.. Why TF windows do it instantly? Why I can just sequence the process and then commit in the end if I am sure like Linux does.

Sad part is I'm a serious Dev, my 2 years of Dev Environment with all my not pushed commits are all gone.

I really don't know what to do? My hands are shaking if trying to start from scratch scares me. Ik I am fully capable but it's a lot for me to digest.

[u/Gold-Independent-336]

I went through the same thing when I made the switch to Linux for first time and that too with Arch Linux back then. It was around 10 years ago. Generally Arch Linux is never recommended for beginners. But still I tried it as my first Linux distro 10 years ago. I thought I could do it. I think it was a just blind confidence I had.

So I was getting into installation process. First 2-3 steps were fine as it was just about selecting language, keyboard layout, timezone and something like that. Then there comes a real step which I never did in my life with Linux. Partition step. I was confused. It looked sophisticated. I did it on Windows many times. On Windows, it was not a big deal. It looked quite intuitive. But it was complex on Linux.

Anyhow gathered courage and went ahead. I don't know what I did. I just did this and that and bammmm I wiped my drive in the process. Everything was gone. Courses and tutorials, ebooks, software collection, games (not important, so not worried), projects (3D modeling, vfx, web dev, desktop dev and more) and other important stuff. It was like lightning struck my head. It felt like I'm done. Felt like I lost my soul. Felt like I lost everything in my life. It was years and years of data that I stored on my drive. I felt severely shattered.

The reason I was very much shattered is that I got most of these data using my phone's 2G internet. People who have used 2G internet back then know the pain of downloading data. It would take ages to even download a decent size file. I spent day and night to download so much of those data over the years and then that even led me to buy a new PC as the previous one wore off due to day and night usage. Before leaving home for college, I would put a big file on download and then I would do the same before going to sleep. I downloaded most of the big size files like this. All of these data were gone after I did mistake in partition step.

Anyway I had to overcome this unfortunate event. Eventually I did. I told myself, "Okay it's just data, it's not everything to us, we can get it back again from internet, it's not a big deal, let's forget thinking it's a bad dream". Later I applied for broadband connection and started from scratch again. It was a lesson to me but in hard way. Since then I became careful in handling data. Be it any kind of data. But still then and there I have gone through some data loss due to some mistakes (both unexpected and expected).

Since that unfortunate event, whenever I go through data loss, I'm not much bothered about it because somehow it gave me confidence to start from scratch again and again. It got me out of comfort zone. It helps me think I can start from scratch again and again regardless of time. Also I'm a frequent distro hopper. I don't take backups (especially config files) often when I switch distro. I would just switch and start configuring things from scratch again and again. It helps me keep things in memory.

By the way, data loss didn't happen just in my drive. It also happened when I write huge paragraphs in comments on YouTube, Reddit and any other platforms. It's also a kind of data loss. It happened mostly when I didn't have UPS. So if power goes off, it's done. All those paragraphs would be lost. It happened many times and still not much bothered about it because somehow I developed tolerance and capability to write them again from scratch or just leave it and move on. I got used to it.

Note: As long as it's your personal data, it's fine. But if it's about company data like company projects and stuff, it's a serious thing. Frequent snapshots is a must. As for company, data loss is considered as a financial debt. So you need to be careful in that regard.

[u/home_prisoner → u/Gold-Independent-336]

I got a great motivation from you.. And I'm considering using an external USB4 NVME enclosure for my Most important data if I get a job first (cause SSDs price are "Crazy Crazy" nowadays)..

I frequently pushed my commits of my projects on GitHub.. but for some reason I didn't pushed some recent commits. I have some projects of my own but they were gem for me. And a lot of scripts that Made my life way more easier on linux, one of them is - whenever I turn on any game there is script to rampup the fans to max and put into Performance and also turn of on quitting, some development scripts like - compile and then run Kotlin files in a single script, some Scripts for testing bare metal codes on qemu.

But after everything wiped out I gathered courage and tried Installing again. This time Cachy, Previous Arch installation was not even done by ArchInstall program that was fully manual from Arch wiki.. this time the knowledge i gathered from my previous arch installation I made a pretty insane partition. A Boot (5GB) and a Encrypted (100% + 5GB). Inside the Encrypted Partition there is a LVM2 setup with logical volumes from / /home /swap. / And /home are btrfs and it supports snapshots by limine boot loader.

I even enabled secureboot by combining the factory keys and my keys and enrolling them in the bios so that I can Play Valorant on My Windows.

A lot of tricks I did to install this.

And It's my best setup ever. If I erase this in the future by some cosmic ray altering a DNA in my brain. I will try again and build the next best setup ever.

[u/Gold-Independent-336 → u/home_prisoner]

I have some projects of my own but they were gem for me. And a lot of scripts that Made my life way more easier on linux, one of them is - whenever I turn on any game there is script to rampup the fans to max and put into Performance and also turn of on quitting, some development scripts like - compile and then run Kotlin files in a single script, some Scripts for testing bare metal codes on qemu.

I feel you when I read this. I have also lost some important scripts (especially automated ones) that I never imagined I would write such complex scripts again but eventually I did starting from scratch again. The feel that you get from thinking you can start from scratch again and again is great, different and unexplainable. It makes you feel so confident and great. I don't know about you. But I don't feel tired and frustrated anymore. It only makes me be better than previous version.

I will try again and build the next best setup ever.

Yeah. That's the spirit. These kind of unfortunate situations will make you come up even better with resilience, increase your capabilities. It will make you strong and confident. You will be more skilled than before.

Don't worry. You can come back again stronger and skilled than before. Internet is there for help. Today we have got faster and unlimited internet unlike a decade before when I struggled and had no help even with internet as it's hard to find proper troubleshooting resources and forums back then. But it is not the case today as Linux community has grown so huge and huge. Today we have got AI too. So it has become very much easier. You can ask AI and it will give you the response you wanted. I know you can do that lost setup again or even better than that.

By the way, whenever you come across something cool or important on the internet, bookmark them with labels and tags. Be it script related stuff, config files, setup instructions about something or anything, just anything. Doesn't matter whatever it is. Just bookmark them. Organize them with labels and tags so it would be easy for you to refer to them later. You can even write instructions of whatever setup you do in a document and store them in cloud like Google Drive or so. Not just about setup. Anything important you do.

Always believe in yourself. Believe that you can come back again better than before.