Had 2 backups (1 SD card, 1 HDD) for my "Document" folder.
I was trying to replace my GRUB MBR bootloader for REFind's EFI so I could dualboot on a new laptop (and swap-in my old one's SSD without having to reinsall the whole system: Arch). Unfortunately, the boot partition was too small, and needed to be re-sized from 512MB to 1GB. Foolishly, and in a rush, I thought using gparted to change the partition boundaries (shrink the root partition by 512MB from the beginning, and stretch the boot partition to 1GB from the end) was the answer.
I completely forgot that EXT4 has a superblock at the beginning, so now it was gone, and the root partition was completely unmountable -- and fsck was of no use.
So I scramble to find my backups (to decide whether or not I should figure out how to fix this), and realize that tiny little SD card was missing, and my HDD backup was completely unmountable.
Truly, a major fuck-up.
Thankfully, I didn't write anything to the boot partition, so throwing a Hail Mary and simply resizing the partitions back to their exact original sizes (thankfully x2 my TTS history was useful), allowed the root drive to mount without a hitch.
I was close to losing all of my KeepPassXC passwords and private keys due to shear idiocy.
In the end, I set up "cloud" backups (second storage media type, and long and far away), switched to Debian, and continued on my merry way.
A cynical take would be that currently there are enough emotional outlets for one to feel like one is actually making change, rather than actually making change, that no "real" shift will ever happen.
Assuming there is a way to catalyze real change, how would you even get enough people to buy-in, and why would they? If there are an endless amount of emotional "fixes" to the feeling of "something is wrong, I am uncomfortable with the way things appear, I should do something" -- that also have an almost zero-cost to doing, but create no tangible change -- why would anyone try something "different," when what they have already is able to regain emotional homeostasis?
The only reason I can think of is a rare moral fiber, that pushes one to do what is uncomfortable; which in the end is still the same thing: fulfilling an emotional need (e.g. I would be a deadbeat coward for willfully deluding myself that any other path is anything but emotional masturbation, so I should do what I can to avoid feeling like so).
What are your thoughts on my notions? Do you have any hope? Or is this simply a tragedy that one needs to accept, and keep on moving forward.
3 backups
2 different media types
1 off-site