This is a reminder to everyone to regularly back up your data, or at least regularly enough, especially for older devices. The unthinkable happened yesterday and my largest, most sensitive, important data disk drive is experiencing hardware failure, and the disk health has plummeted all the way to zero overnight, so the data on that drive is in a critical state, all 4TB of it.
When I thought that was the worst of it, the water pumps (for watercooling the CPU) decided to start mechanically failing, resulting in my watercooling no longer functioning, and my CPU heating up to constant 98⁰C.
Laziness and poor prioritizing has taken it's toll here. The PC is EXTREMELY old, and I lost respect for it's health, all because I was planning to build an entirely new one just before the pandemic, with no intention of salvaging any hardware besides the data. Since the beginning of the pandemic forced me to postpone that plan, the PC remained in the exact same state, with no real maintenance or backups performed.
The water pumps and motherboard alone are over 8 years old, and I ran the system like a server, so pretty much 24/7 uptime. Those pumps were definitely going to fail sometime.
I'm now having to use a secondary PC to perform disk drive maintenance and low-level backups, and even with my knowledge and experience, it's going to be hard and data recovery (or at least the recovery of significant data) isn't guaranteed.
The average user in my shoes would be more than devastated. Imagine assuming all your projects, portfolios, photos, etc are entirely no longer accessible.
A data backup every couple months, if not monthly or weekly, is all it would take to turn this issue into a mere inconvenience.
If you're reading this, and you know you haven't backed up your important data, this is a nudge to do so today, ESPECIALLY if you aren't IT or tech savvy.
And even if you are IT or tech savvy, these are truly deep, hardcore, unconventional maintenance tactics necessary for a shot at recovering data from a disk in this state.
Start your back up now.