[justizin]

That is quite frustrating, and consumer vendors should be mindful of creating life-changing experiences.

Also: backups. I know it sounds cliche, but look, if it has a mechanical hard drive, the manufacturer could have slightly mis-calibrated one of the mechanical assemblies, and this could have happened because the nature of digital storage is that it is essentially ephemeral.

Protect yourself from things outside your control. You don't need the most sophisticated solution, just an external usb drive.

[Chattered]

But if that external usb drive is mounted at the time (as in the case of the user this thread is about), then all data on that drive will be deleted.

For this reason, the recommened way to use things like rsnapshot is to have your backup directories owned by root and with permissions masked to something like rwxr--r--. If you then want to read your backups easily, you do things like mount it under NFS as read-only.

[Latty]

A (RAID6) fileserver running ZFS with filesystem-level snapshotting. It's really, really good.

[cmurf]

Btrfs snapshots, and then cp --reflink from the snapshot to the current tree whatever files or directories are missing; i.e. no need to rollback to a snapshot.

[moe]

Or if you're on a Mac you don't even need any extra hardware.

Just ARQ and an AWS Account [or google drive, or dreamobjects, or SFTP, or...].

Your backup is client side encrypted and completely painless. Take half an hour to set it up and then just forget it till it saves your ass.

Not affiliated, just a fan: http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/