#data loss

I just lost 15.5 years (nearly half my life's) worth of all of art files ( including the most recent ones I shared here) that I was transferring (not copy, unfortunately) onto another storage for archiving purposes.

It's the one thing I try to be good at and all proof of the journey I took to get to where I am skill-wise, all the hard work I have done, just... gone.

"Oh, you're being dramatic! It's just some PSDs. Just start drawing again."

...yeah. Just some PSDs. No big deal.

It's just... I don't have any other backup, nor have I had luck with doing the recovery myself and I can't afford pro services to do it for me.

I wonder if this is a sign for me to just give up drawing and find something else productive.

Anyway...

Let this be a lesson and a reminder to all creators out there, doesn't matter what the purpose is:

PLEASE ALWAYS BACKUP YOUR FILES! AT LEAST ONE ON A PHYSICAL DRIVE FOR EASY OFFLINE ACCESS AND ONE CLOUD STORAGE IN CASE OF MECHANICAL FAILURE.

Only now, after this catastrophic failure, did I realize how important the last one is.

I may be rather preoccupied for the foreseeable future so I am sorry for any delayed responses, etc.

I fancy myself a computer nerd but I am by no means a computer expert.

For years I have been using simple little 4-port usb hubs on my laptop, due to it's own small internal drive, my dislike of touchpads (I use a mouse), and the need to access my multiple external hard drives.

Well, over the years these flimsy cheap little usb hubs would disconnect from things at the slightest bump of a wire but thankfully I never suffered serious data loss. I would use the Windows error checking tool and sometimes chkdsk in command prompt, and things would be fine afterwards (as far as I could tell). Even at the beginning of this month I used chkdsk to fix a hard drive that had specifically corrupted folders on it.

Unfortunately, it looks I put myself in hot water this time.

Big ol 8 tb hard drive. connected it on Tuesday to look for some music, had errors, ran error. froze at 100 percent. Waited 24 hours. Tried again. Froze at 100 percent. Again.

So then I tried chkdsk /r and it eventually seemed to finish. Thinking it had done its job, I was concerned I still had trouble getting to folders. Any folder that had corrupted threw an error if I tried to delete it and documents on it had garbled nonsense text. I restarted my laptop and was able to start copying some files off of it but noticed I still couldn't delete the corrupted folders. I got concerned and read more about chkdsk and then tried chkdsk f/ r/ and it found way more corruption than the first time, which made my heart sink as I realized this was likely due to me trying to rescue files before the drive was properly repaired. Eventually that scan got stuck with the error message "chkdsk An unspecified error occurred (766f6c756d652e63 470)."

So now I'm currently trying chkdsk f r x, as "x" locks the hard drive and I'm hoping that will help.

I'm so tired. :( I just want my files to be safe.

I really regret not ordering a big sturdy usb hub sooner and I really hope mine arrives quickly. Probably should have gone to a store to get one, immediately, but well, here I am.

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