entry17

[ironicbadger]

About 10 years ago, I convinced my wife to stop using Google Photos and to allow me to back up all our photos on a local hard drive. I was fairly new to Linux at the time and needed to reinstall Ubuntu to fix some problems. During install, my 1 TB HDD was appearing twice in the list of devices. Confused by this but convinced it was a quirk of the Ubuntu installer, I wiped both hard drives and reinstalled. After the first boot, I suddenly realised that I had left my 1TB external drive attached and had wiped the only copy of all my wife’s photos, dating back to her first digital camera as a teenager, and including her year spent living and working in Thailand. Knowing what I know now about storage devices, I probably could have saved the data but at the time, I just accepted all was lost and begged for forgiveness.