For the last few days I have been painstakingly attempting to back data up off of a drive that has been slowly going south. I have no clue how and when it started failing, but I was first made aware of this fact with a blue screen of death complaining about storage issues. The G Drive was a 3 TB mechanical drive where I stored all of those windows folders like My Documents, Downloads and Videos to try and keep them off of the very small SSD boot drive. However since it was filling up, I had started migrating a lot of my game installs to either the 1 TB m.2 drive or the other 4 TB mechanical I had in the system.
I have sitting here a brand new 5 TB mechanical that I was going to put in another system as well as 8 TB of network attached storage that I was just about to use for replacing my aging and filling 4 TB system. So I got the 8 TB online and started furiously trying to back everything up that I could off of my G Drive. I also attempted to relocated the various windows systems over to my F Drive, which still had ample space. However it appears that the G Drive was further gone than I realized, and now I am going to pay the price of my laziness.
I have a complicated method for storing my game screenshots. Namely I have capture software dump everything into a single directory, and then every so often I sort through that directory and file them away more permanently on the network storage. However with everything going on… I had not done this filing away step in a really long time. The above screenshot is what my captures directory now looks like. Every image that is showing up with that default icon… is unreadable and effectively lost forever. There doesn’t seem to be much of a rhyme or reason as to what is lost.
What concerns me more greatly than some screenshots that I had yet to file away however is that my G Drive as also the home of my emulation archives. If the images are any evidence… I am going to have a large number of corrupted files. All of my “favorites” are currently sitting on my RG350, however I had two different complete MAME sets for different versions and not that it cannot be acquired again, but it is always a pain in the ass to do so. In reality there is very little of what I store on my drives that cannot be reacquired again… but it is the time lost that I mourn.
Yesterday during the day and in the middle of trying to recover more files… I got another blue screen of death and this time when the system booted back up the drive was no longer available. So this weekend is going to be me swapping drives, finishing the process of swapping network storage… and then trying to use my SATA to USB drive recovery set up to pull more data from the dead drive. I got quite a bit of the things that mattered to me off, but whether or not they REALLY copied is suspect at this point.
The long story short… if you care about it store it in multiple places. Which is making me realize that I might need to research some proper cloud storage options for the huge volume of raw recorded audio that I have from the various podcast projects.
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