And this is why you do backups...
More pictures in comments.

Why you should always backup.

Nearly a year ago I developed a whole project (iOS, tvOS, watchOS), but I never backed it up because I had a recent machine and thought the chance that something happens to the disk is so small I didn’t backup. But then my mac didn’t start correctly. So I needed to reset it. Lose the project, some other files but not much else. Then I recoded the project and backed it up on multiple places. But a little later, I was writing another app, again didn’t copy again... This time I deleted the wrong folder and deleted the trash, was gone too. So from then I learned to copy everything I coded. All projects I work on, I keep a copy of on an external disk, GitHub and Bitbucket. Assuming they wont crash all at the same time 😉.

So I recommend everyone to backup all your code. Even if it’s only 500 lines. Losing it is hard...

"Hello R., how are you?"
"Hi M.! I'm at the beach now, finally relaxing after months of work."
"I wanted to ask you this: did you remember, three years ago, when you helped me move the downloaded movies to my external hard disk?"
"Er... yes?"
"Well, today I tried to start my computer and it's showing me a black screen telling \"disk boot failure, insert system disk\", do you know how to solve it? Before you worked on it, it used to work as a charm..."

A few days after the vacation, daddy (me) finally finished copying all the photos from the digital camera to the big external hard drive. Left it lying in the living room, in the corner where all the tech stuff frequently lies. In come my boys, and I'm not sure why, they start plugging power supplies around. Unfortunately the one from the laptop fit into the hole on the external disk, but had a different (higher) voltage. Result: 1 fried hard drive, containing all the baby photos and videos of said boys up that time.
I still believe that it's only the circuit board that is fried, and the data is still all there. I still have the hope to find a used disk, replace the board and all will be back.

Got myself this on new year. For all my data. Hope it's a good decision!

Happy New Year everyone ^_^

My 2tb portable external hard disk is messed up :( . The disk isn't spinning. It is under warranty but I am so depressed.

- Started learning python
- New semester's about to start in college

...and laptop got recked.

Shows the post screen and crashes and reboots repeatedly. Tried to fix it and now the display doesn't light up and the Hard-Disk makes screeching noise. I didn't even touch the display. HDD maybe.

Removed the HDD and tried to recover it from my friends PC, but it turns out it was already dead. All my data from 1 month ago is gone (thank god for external HDD) and I cannot learn python anymore cause I don't have any backup computer.

I don't even know if I can afford to get it repaired if they say they have to replace the entire motherboard in the laptop.

FUCK!!!

We had an ADAM/Colecovision unit before this, but I don't really count it, as it was more of a console for us than a computer.

In 1986 dad brought home a Tandy 1000 SX. It had an Intel 8088 processor, 64k of memory, and no hard drive. With dual 5.25" floppy drives, our write-protected DOS 3.1 disk stayed in drive A almost all the time. Games and other software were run from drive B, or from the external cassette drive. For really big games, like Conquest of Camelot and Space Quest 3, we were frequently prompted to swap disks in B: before the game could continue.

Space Quest, King's Quest, Lords of Conquest, Conquest of Camelot, Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer, several editions of Carmen Sandiego, and at least a dozen other games dominated our gaming use. We wrote papers with WordStar, and my parents maintained their budget with Lotus 1-2-3.

A year or two later, Dad installed a 10 MB hard drive, and we started booting DOS off that instead. Heady days.

Back in 2005, I had quite a few bits of music I was working on (just as a hobby). A lot of these had not been finished, but I'd sent excerpts in medium-quality MP3 format to a friend. I had an external backup drive - a regular hard drive in an USB enclosure. After a while, this drive started making unpleasant whining sounds so I sent it off for replacement.

During that time I made the foolish decision to try and plug a floppy drive in while the PC was powered on. Something touched the bottom of the hard drive and the power went off. I powered it back on again and heard a fizzing sound, there were some flashes from the hard drive and a burning smell. Yep, the disk was dead - and my backup drive was gone.

I'm still not entirely sure what happened, my best guess is that I had an exposed piece of wire from one of my hacky case mods (I had a thing for blue LEDs) which touched the circuitry of the hard drive. Almost every project, piece of software I'd created, every photo I'd taken, and most unfinished music I'd made up until that point - gone. I was pretty devastated about it. I only had a handful of things survived which I'd burned onto CD previously.

I managed to get some excerpts back from my friend, and re-created my favourite pieces of music based on those. I've moved on to other projects and write much better code now, so mostly I am no longer bothered. I do wish I could re-listen to some of the music I had made back then though.

Needless to say, I no longer fiddle around with the innards of my computers while they are on, store everything on mirrored drives and also ensure I always have a backup somewhere (and am working on remote backups and having several days of backups...)

I never want that to happen again

My first CS class is a basic introductory C++ course. Won't even be going into OOP.

So I want to use my own laptop for the course, but I have a Mac. Thought I could use Visual Studio for Mac for the class, but turns out Visual Studio for Mac is really only for Multiplatform development with C#. Ok, then, screw that. Just wasted 20GB and an evening installing that just to uninstall it.

I'm using JetBrain's CLion for now, but apparently we'll be doing some graphics work later this semester so I'm going to need to install Windows via Bootcamp and Visual Studio there... but my SSD is too small...

I currently have Windows/Bootcamp installed on a 1TB external hard disk but that is slow af. My SSD is only 250GB and I've already used half of it for various programs I need (Adobe crap plus Logic crap cuz I make videos and music).

My only option here is to buy a new SSD but only one manufacturer sells those (OWC), and a 1TB SSD is stupid expensive, $700 almost as much as I paid for this laptop used.

So, I guess I'm just kinda deciding right now whether upgrading storage is really worth it...