Oh thank goodness. The data that was lost was the directions to the files. A simple recovery tool found 800K of them, and I was able to recognise files I deleted deliberately and files that weren’t. So yoink, got them copied at least the images and documents, I’ll need to go through to find the rest.

But what caused this completely different issue to my other disk issues? I have no clue. But I know my printer was trying to connect to an app every single second (filling my error log.) And that device management was trying to connect to a non existent server almost as often (partially filling my error log.) And the errors from my drive interspersed.

Searching for information about each error in the log results in either dismissal (all can be safely ignored) to catastrophic (harddrive is failing) when it’s more about the context.

I haven’t wanted to reconnect any drives but this looks to be a somewhat unifying theory “-disk write caching … may also result in the loss of information if a power failure, equipment failure, or software failure occurs.”

So Occam’s Razor would suggest that this is likely causing data loss, luckily only what was being written (as in where to find files) but I still have no further information to distinguish between equipment and software failure. It would be an incredible coincidence that a new platter drive from a well respected brand is failing when the reason my ssd failed was a firmware issue from the shipped drive that wasn’t patched until after they failed so many of us. No, it wasn’t available to update on first use, and once it started to fail updating can’t rescue it. The issue affected drives manufactured between 2021 to 2023.

It could be a coincidence and my cables are failing. Though I’ve had more issues with USB cables and chips which has resulted in needing to open the casing, and taking drives out to put them in new enclosures.

The biggest problem though is that I’m acting like a data centre as far as all this software and hardware is concerned. My build is for gaming- lots of writing- and this issue has only been the last few years. Yes prior to that ssds failed, but at the end of their lives. Not brand new.

So. New cables. Figure out OS configuration. Figure out how to install older printer drivers (probably from my back up.) And try to not stress buy a new hdd given you need to check specific model numbers to know if they are SMR or CBR because…. of course “SMR as data storage, CMR for recurring write processes.” Ditto not forgetting to check what format the drives are in. Data storage is what I thought I was after but, again, my work essentially is data processing. So the external I backed up to is really to copy huge amounts of data and to then transfer it to another drive, wipe and repeat.

I can reformat it but given it probably has the least potentially corrupted files I’m not doing anything to it.

So the holding pattern remains. Luckily there are no currently time sensitive needs to access it all. And I’m not willing to risk all that new information for my Anne of Cleves and North Rhine work nor allll of the record of my life, family, and friends.

It’s just so much across time and space to lose.