Ouch! My PC broke Thursday evening. I am just now starting to get things put back together.
It was my fault, in a backhanded way. A new linux kernel was upgraded, and it is quite a bit larger than they had always been before. It filled up my /boot partition.
To make matters worse, I managed to completely overwrite my backups drive while I was attempting to recover. It’s like everyone has been saying, “One backup is not enough.” I’m having to reconfigure everything as I go. I am thankful that my image files were on a disk drive that was not involved in the fiasco. And I was able to recover my passwords database from my phone.
As I live on my PC, this is a major inconvenience.
Good luck with your new setup! I know that it is incredibly disruptive and takes weeks if not months to get everything back the way you want it.
My old refurb Dell (avoid!!) desktop system that was always buggy, finally kicked the bucket in February. I tried to save it at first, but in the end I’m glad to be rid of that thing. Instead of buying another Dell or off-the-shelf product, I found a great local tech online who runs a mobile service. I had never built a PC on my own before, but I had a good idea of what parts and case I wanted. After consulting with him, he came over here in person and we spent an afternoon putting the thing together and downloading/configuring (sigh!) Windows 11 Pro. (Yes, I want to switch to Linux!) This machine is freaking awesome and I will never buy an off-the-shelf one again if I can avoid it. Nevertheless, after putting this thing together in March, there are still apps and things I have not gotten around to installing and setting up.
Wishing your digital life a swift recovery. After needing to actually restore from a half cooked Backup I learned some valuable lessons a couple of years back. Now all my actually valuable data lives on a NAS and is only synced to local devices or accessed via SMB. That whole NAS is backed up basically 4-4-1 finally giving me peace :-D.
Good luck there. I personally became paranoid after one of my external drives suddenly became prohibitively slow (it timed out during the “There is data that needs to be written before unmounting” process! I did not even know this was possible – now I manually run sync as I think that can run with no limit), and now I have my music on at least three different drives, and I computed md5 sums for all the music tracks (wrote a script to do that incrementally by skipping those already processed).
You probably already know about rsync, but it’s a quick and not-so-dirty way to effortlessly back up stuff. A quick alias in your shell configuration, and voilà.
alias yolo='rsync -auv /some/directory/ /media/you/drive/directory/'
I personally use --ignore-existing for a big speedup when processing my music, as obviously I rarely edit old music files. There’s also a wide array of include / exclude options with support for patterns, and you can automatically add suffixes instead of overwriting stuff, etc.
… I forced myself to stop RawTherapee-ing some picture (I rarely stop midway through so that’s quite a feat for me ) to get some sleep, and here I am paraphrasing a man instead, haha… Typical nerd behavior.
Beware of the weird “fast startup” feature of Windows; I’ve read that it can cause all kinds of hard-to-pinpoint bugs due to locked resources or whatever it was called. When we purchased a desktop computer for my parents, we specifically asked the staff to disable that stuff (since they were going to fiddle with it to remove bloatware and stuff anyway). (Kept Windows in dual boot, but never used it then – not even sure the dual boot was set up successfully. )
I find it best to have an append-only cloud backup (eg borgbackup on borgbase, with server-side pruning).
What I should be doing (but not really doing it at the moment) is a two-level backup system; large media files (photos, music) in one repo (80%), everything else in another (20%), if I need to restore a system I can recover the latter in an hour or so on a fast connection and get to work, waiting for the rest.
Hey Tim, I joined you today in fiddeling with IT. Updated Paperless-NGX running via docker without reading the Release notes (learned that lesson with Immich before but well - here I go again).
They apparently dropped support for postgres 13 and I managed to bugger things up even more trying to update the database. I was VERY glad for the nightly scheduled BTRFS snapshots today.
) to get some sleep, and here I am paraphrasing a 
Typical nerd behavior.