This isn't real scary, but it is incredibly disappointing and painful....
Painful for my loss and painful to admit my stupidity.
I thought I'd share my experience in case my bad experience will prevent someone else a loss of priceless data.
2 days ago I plugged in my backup external hard drive to search something. It failed to turn on.
I assume it had a catastrophic failure.
It appears I have lost about 21 years of backed up data... everything imaginable!
I was so upset that I didn't get much sleep that night.
I have a 2nd external backup hard drive, but it did not have the amount of data that was on the bigger drive, and the files were only from 2015 and earlier.
Even though the drive was only turned on when I did short bursts of backups or to search on previously backup files, I should have known and been aware of the potential failure.
I did have some recent files backed up in the "cloud", but I did not have my big drive backed up in the cloud.
In computer technology and systems, there is a very important word -- REDUNDANCY!!
So.. I immediately ordered a 2T Seagate external hard drive, and have backed up as many files as I have now from two computers.
I will do another backup to a cloud storage location.
I will buy another external hard drive and use it to do a secondary full back up for redundancy.
Gnarls.
