I just discovered something I did so idiotic I need a stronger adjective that what is in my name.

For one of my installs, I accidentally overwrote my 1TB HDD. A few minutes ago I wanted to put back some files… and all I saw was a distro.

It confused me because I was not sure if I was on my solid state drive or the HDD.

So, those files are gone. A lot is gone. Nothing too precious, I think… It might be a tremendous fuck up.

See kids, this is why you back up. Off the computer. Oh well.

EDIT: Recovering files using Photorec. Everyone who recommended this to me is a hero. Also a hero is the person who recommended FTK, but I was too eager to use something now than to sign up to download. I still should though…

  • Chais@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    1 year ago

    Accidentally flashed a live image (PCBSD, IIRC) onto my 1TB external HDD instead of the thumb drive. Lost years of collected music and movies that night. I learned two things:

    1. Don’t do this sort of thing in the middle of the night, when you’re tired and should be sleeping.
    2. dd is nicknamed ‘disk destroyer’ for good reason.
      • Pantherina@feddit.de
        0·
        1 year ago

        Its possible using homedir backup etc. Or on Fedora Atomic simply switching desktops. But yeah Desktops are all over the place, having a ~/.kde folder where EVERYTHING is stored would be great.

        • DidacticDumbass@lemmy.oneOPEnglish
          0·
          1 year ago

          Oh, I am on Fedora Silverblue with Gnome. If it is easy to switch, I think I will give KDE a try!

          I like Gnome, and I definitely need to tweak some behavior I find annoying, but I feel I never gave KDE a proper chance because I seem to mess up the panel whenever I look at it wrong, and have no idea how to get back to default.

          • Pantherina@feddit.de
            0·
            1 year ago

            Yeeah that panel. The only problem is opening the start menu with “super” though. You can always add a “default” panel.

            Maybe do it like this: create a keyboard shortcut ctrl+alt+t for konsole, whyever it is not default. Then remove all panels and run qdbus org.kde.ksmserver /KSMServer 0 0 1 (alias that to “logout” in your .bashrc, its a horrible command).

            Then remove all panels and logout. Log back in, add a default panel and maybe you are already good. Maybe log out again. The only default panel normally always gets the correct start menu. Its a bit messed up.

            To switch between silverblue and kinoite you can just rebase, but make sure to backup all your “dotfiles” (the hidden configs for all the apps) and start plain, as you dont want to mix these.

            There is a youtube video on exactly that somewhere.

            • DidacticDumbass@lemmy.oneOPEnglish
              0·
              1 year ago

              Ah, thank you for the write up. I will actually do that because KDE something I know I will like and enjoy more than GNOME once I get past some of the weirdness. Mostly, I want to customize it in certain ways, and while GNOME surely is customizable, it is not as easy as KDE.

              Yeah, rebasing feels like some scifi future tech and I am ready to play. It is like resleeving ala Altered Carbon.

              • Pantherina@feddit.de
                0·
                1 year ago

                I am not sure. KDE is very customizable and I like the… regular way apps work, trays work, decorations work and all that. Also GNOME is like the anti-poweruser desktop. I like its style, but its like “use a terminal or nothing”. Needing extra apps for every small thing and all…

                The downside maybe is stability… and Gnome does some things well, like quicksettings and all.

                I also like that GTK is easier to develop for probably, with Gnome Builder and similar tooling. But at the same time, the UI would be pretty much unusable for complex apps like Dolphin.

                I tried Gimp 3.x prerelease and well, GTK3 is weird, its already this step away from the more similar styles.

                Well rebasing is pretty nice, its swapping out the foundation while keeping the top intact. For things like Kinoite->Ublue-kinoite-main its just a reboot.

                • DidacticDumbass@lemmy.oneOPEnglish
                  0·
                  1 year ago

                  Do you need to pin the last working ostree before rebasing? I guess I want an easy way to switch between working environments without a lot of rebasing.

  • Holzkohlen@feddit.de
    0·
    1 year ago

    Nothing special, I just kept distrohopping and backing up my home folder to a seperate drive each time via rsync. Eventually I messed that up somewhere, some data was lost. I think that was early this year.
    Nothing to major, bit of a nuisance is all. And a grim reminder that eventually you WILL mess up. It’s just a matter of time really. So try to minimize the factors that lead to mishaps like distrohopping and be diligent with your backups.