Major melt down meets Kernel Panic. ;)

[Dart]

Late last night both my Linux desktop's died. They're both on a UPS which does have surge protection. I JUST got one going minutes ago. I'm pretty sure the OS drives on both machines are toast. I'm glad I don't throw things away as I found an old drive with an even older version of CentOS 7. Right now I only have the old Cent7 disks connected. I believe it's supposed to be good till the end of '23 or 4. It was "just" updated and pending a reboot. So, I'll reboot and finish this up later. Once I'm comfortable that things are going well, I'll hook up the data, backup and LTS drive and see how they weathered the hit.

 

[KGIII]

That's rough. It's a bit late, but:

How To: Have A Proper Backup Of Your Data • Linux Tips

In today's article, we're going to show you how to have a proper backup of your data. I've wanted to write this article for a while.

linux-tips.us

So, it's late for this time - and early for the next...

Now, like you, I had an old-school APC UPS. They were fairly new back then. LOL I can't recall if it used its own ethernet adapter or if it was attached with the serial port?

Anyhow, my house was surrounded by, and presumably hit, a bunch of lighting strikes - in the middle of a very heavy storm. There was enough EMR to erase disks that weren't even plugged in. In complete weirdness, even some optical media failed after this. But, all the magnetic storage devices were toasted.

It's a clear demarcation in my files. (I have some old files.) You have the few files that could be recovered before, and those files saved since. Very few files were recovered, even using professional data recovery services.

If I'd been following the 3-2-1 backup method, I'd have been much better off, perhaps not losing any important data.

Finally, sorry for your data loss. Hopefully it's not too major and you didn't lose anything important.

I wonder if solid state drives would have fared better in my (and presumably your) case. Were you using HDDs or SSDs?

 

[Dart]

I do have a complete backup. Thanks to mounting different file partitions to different disks, 90+% back to normal, However... When things like this happen, I like to take the opertunity to change things up. Seriously, is there a better time? You already have to do some moderate to serious sergery. One of the massively cool things about being in IT is, when some hardware becomes obsoleted by windows, Linux is happy to play with them. Actually, it's the best time. It's only to my lethargic reaction time that I'm only at 90%. I did take the time to play around with a couple of other graphics cards.

The moral of the story is... All things in time. Be prepared and you don't have to sweat the small stuff. Catastrophic failures... That's another story,

 

[KGIII]

Seriously, is there a better time?

Nope! LOL That is indeed the perfect time to start anew.

These days, my 'basic instructions' (for myself) are consistent and due to having done a ton of installations. But, yeah, now would be the time when I'd do something different - just to keep learning. I might try a different default distro, a different file system, or even play around with disk encryption.

They say you gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette. Well, in this case, the eggs are already broken.

As for my above story, for the life of me I still can't explain why data was corrupted on disks that weren't even powered on other than to say it must have been a whole lot of EMR.