TestDisk has saved my ass before. It’s great at recovering broken partitions. If it’s just a quick format done with no encryption involved, you have a very high chance of having your stuff back. That’s of course if you catch yourself after doing just the format.
Other than that, yeah, I’ve also had my moments. Back in high school not only did I not have money for an external drive - I didn’t even have enough space on my primary one. One time a friend lent me an external drive to do a backup and do a clean reinstall - and I can’t remember the details, but something happened such that the external drive got borked - and said friend had important stuff that was only on that hard drive. Ironically enough it wasn’t even something taking much space - it was text documents that could’ve lived in an email attachment.
SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
Yup!
Also totally unrelated helpful tip- triple check your inputs and outputs when using dd to clone a drive. dd works great to clone an old drive onto a new blank one. It is equally efficient at cloning a blank drive full of nothing but 0s over an old drive that has some 1s mixed in.
kamen@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
And that’s a great example where a GUI could be way better at showing you what’s what and preventing such errors.
If you’re automating stuff, sure, scripting is the way to go, but for one-off stuff like this seeing more than text and maybe throwing in a confirmation dialogue can’t hurt - and the tool might still be using
ddunderneath.SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
Quite true.
It’s an argument I often have with the CLI only people, and have been having for years. Like ‘with this Cisco router I can do all kinds of shit with this super powerful CLI’. Yeah okay how do I forward a port? Well that takes 5 different commands…
Or I just want to understand what options are available- a GUI does that far better than a CLI.
kamen@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
IMO it’s important to recognise that both are valid in different scenarios. If you want to click through and change something that’s actually doable with a couple of clicks, that’s fine. If you want to do this through the CLI, it’s also fine - if you’re someone who’s done 10 deployments today and configured the same thing, it would be muscle memory even if it’s 5 commands.