this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2024
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lol thatās all Greek to me but thanks, Iāve made a note to try and figure it out.
Basically it was my own lack of planning and consistency. I was too lazy or distracted to backup consistently, head full of whatever I was busy with, or gave/lent my backed-up-on-cd music collection to someone else I didnāt stay in contact with. Then my computer would get a virus or a component would break and that was it. Or I lost stuff in moves, or a hard drive I kept to try and salvage later got irreparably damaged in storage.
I still have some kept drives I might try to get data off when I figure out how to do it safely. I know there are a few ways of doing data recovery and I have at least once managed to get a computer going again with a bootable Linux usb just long enough to grab the important stuff. Iāve even used it to rescue scan and find viruses that hid from the AV. Another time I manually put the drive in a drive enclosure.
But with some it might still be risky. I know at least one forces you to enter your Microsoft password to log in (at least while in the computer) which I donāt want to do on a compromised device. I havenāt tried to see if the Linux usb can bypass that or if thatās guarded against. Iām also not sure if thereās any āprotectionsā against accessing data while the drive is out of the machine but I do know that stuff exists with some hard drives so we will see.
Anything I know about computers I had to teach myself, so despite trying to catch up thereās knowledge gaps and lack of experience with some things.
Idk the old drives arenāt urgent. I think for now Iāll focus on getting anything important and possibly time sensitive downloaded to local and then back it up to the hard drive I have, and the hard drives can wait til I have the brain space to deal with it.
You don't need to figure it out mate, I can explain anything you need me to. Been hacking since the commodore 64 days and I love to teach.
I understand about the lost music, I have so much locally backed up music in my birth country, music that doesn't exist anywhere anymore. No one has the skills to boot it up or can be arsed sending my stacks of backups for me to sort, share and preserve...
Why you getting viruses? Too many porn.exe downloads hehe? Your talking about the risk of a boot sector virus and if you have one of those, wtf were you doing lol?
Yeah a Linux USB bootable stick can help if it can read those non native partition formats. Different file system after all, they try but don't always succeed. Those recovery programs are useful but if you've used the device those bits have potentially been mutated so best of luck.
Do you have a spare PC to throw this in and air gap it if you're that concerned? What kinda of drives are they? Could you connect it to a cheap raspberry pi if you're really worried?
Also pretty much certain your drive isn't bitlocked or you have any concerns outside of your data being unretrievable because of a head crash.
Learning is fun so keep doing it!
And yeah, local is fun. But having cloud backups too is also prudent if you really care about the data. You can also still burn things to discs!
(Apologies if I've missed anything, lot to reply to and am on mobile)
Cheers, didnāt really get taught any of this. Haha no pr0n.exe downloads! Just past lack of education about net safety or didnāt shell out for good AV, or maybe forgot regular updates.
Most are various laptop drives within the 15 year old range. I forget what connections.
It happened to the desktop a few times but I just shelved the old drive for later retrieval, put in fresh drive and installed OS againā¦š¶ Seaview, maybe SATA. Replaced it with a SSD. Iād have to find it.
Fingers crossed thatās itās not the heads because thatās actual physical damage I think. But itās usually that something else broke, or there was something bad on there I didnāt trust I had the skills to completely clean.
Spare pc is a possibility, I just would have to back up and wipe an old laptop and Iām kind of struggling with day to day chores as is. Also it feels like wasting a pc by exposing a safe one if that makes sense?
(Also can you have separate backups on the same external drive? As in you can keep many different versions and from different computers without anything getting overwritten?
I think so but Iāve usually had to kind of just do a quick bandaid solution to get my computer going again, and have had fears of reinfecting by restoring data in the wrong way.)
I could buy a raspberry pi as theyāre cheap but I donāt know if I have the brain cells for the learning curve rn.
It should be ok. I just need to back up social media pics locally first, then grab the stuff from other cloud storage, and then back the computer/s up. (And try to grab contact info of establish an outside connection in case social media requires ID in like a year.) The drives are sitting there and hopefully wonāt get damaged or lost before I can get to them.
Really sorry for the slow reply. Cats are cute n all but I wish they'd stop trying to kill me.
I use absolutely zero AV and the only time I've gotten a virus was when I planned to troll a mate with a virus, left it for a year and forgot what the file was for and tried running it... I don't want to end up on a list so just know it's somewhere you've been or something you've done that has got you infected. No blackhat will specifically target you, you're not worth it.
So unless you've been targeted by a government the chances are that the virus is just embedded in to the host OS. If you don't boot into that OS, you can plug in those drives anywhere grab the data and go as there's nothing telling the virus to execute.
If it's bootsector and connected via USB though then you might as well consider it lost unless you don't mind paying top dollar for recovery or spending time you don't have. Hopefully obviously BIOS level infections are machine specific as they're firmware level attacks.
From the sounds of things they will all be IDE or SATA, I'm assuming you're not talking about NVMe. The IDE and SATA diff, if mix and match might be a nuisance so a desktop might be easier unless that spare laptop (which will 99.99999% be fine) has connectors for to those drives, so it all comes down to how badly you want the data.
Yeah head crash is near game over. I once jerry rigged two desktops together and knocked an empty bottle onto my primary music drive... Gone. Lesson there, don't party with your mates when you have an open jerry rigged machine and wanna listen to music. Lol.
NAS: I have snapshots locally and do not need your use case outside of dev work. There will be better solutions but first thought you could just host git on the NAS, but at that point you might as well just use GitHub.com and although as a trunk based dev this kills me to say, use branches. It's free and you can store blobs (so images / music). Doing pirated stuff though risks you being banned. Local set up is piss easy though on a NAS and you just need to git good hehe.
From your last couple.of paragraphs it sounds like you don't need my level of setup and if you drop the multiple versions requirement you could just buy an external storage device and do a bit of scripting to grab all the data (or just manually do it). It'll save you time and money.
I hope I covered everything but it's a weird hour and need to go back to bed ā¤ļø
(feel free to ask anything)