So, I decided to install Linux Mint about a week or two ago.

It was fine for the most part, it ran fine, drivers were fine, installed things fine, no problems, but it was kind of an impulse move at 1am and I soon realised I did not think things through.

I was initially going to install it permanently and move away from Windows following the horrible updates and decisions made by Microslop, but what I hadn’t realised is actually how much I depend on Windows for work, such as using Substance Painter for texturing my 3D models.

Everything had alternatives or just had a Linux version, such as Flameshot for ShareX, meanwhile Steam has an official Linux build. Most games ran just fine thanks to Proton, games like GMod, Euro Truck Simulator 2 and VRChat, although I did have to install a custom Proton version to get media players working, but that was the only real problem.

But then I realised that to continue texturing my 3D models, I needed Substance Painter which, Adobe being Adobe, flat out doesn’t work on Linux even using something like WINE. There is a version on Steam, but I’m not paying for Adobe software any time soon. I had used GenP to crack Creative Cloud and Substance Painter along with LightRoom Classic, and those all worked fine.

So after a week of just feeling unconfortable the entire time since it was an entirely new operating system, I just decided I would switch back to Windows where I could just go back to where I was and still be able to use everything just fine.

Oh how wrong I was.

One night, I tried for hours to get a Windows ISO to boot from a usb drive. No matter what I did, it just would not fucking boot. It would either just boot back into Linux or it’d display a broken screen for a few seconds before just booting back into Linux. I tried several different softwares, different format types, everything, but it just would not boot.

So I took it to a local PC shop as the guy who works there is a friend of mine and I’ve known him for years. Told him to just install Windows and that was it.

Now starts the fun part.

I forgot to tell him, “Do not wipe the other SSD. That holds my most important files”. When I got back home and signed in, fucking everything was gone. A whole terabyte of all my work erased. The whole SSD was entirely empty.

Immediate panic.

As soon as I saw this I practically went into shock seeing all my work fucking deleted. I took it back to him and told him that everything was gone. And he said that he could try to recover it, but the SSD is M.2, which apparently is much harder to recover deleted data from. So far, it’s been days of waiting for him trying recover the data, but it is not looking good.

In hindsight, I probably should’ve taken out the SSD right? To make sure that the data doesn’t get deleted? Yes, I should have. But I had woken up extremely early and just wasn’t quite thinking straight.

I probably should’ve been backing up my files right? To make sure that this never happens? Yes, I should have. But I just don’t have the capacity to do so. I have so many files to store, that I just don’t think 3 32GB SD cards would cut it. They’re extremely slow to read and write to and I just didn’t think about it on the day.

I had some backups on Google Drive and OneDrive, but I don’t back any files up that often. I’m not paying for extra storage and with the amount of data I have, I would have to be paying quite a lot. Now there was some stuff there, such as some sona art and pictures from my old dog, but that’s it. No pictures of planes, no pictures of my current dog, no pictures from my old camera, nothing. Zero.

Thankfully, the files for my sona’s 3D model was in Google Drive, but only the .blend file, no .spp files for textures or .fbx files for accessories and clothing. Just the .blend file, which thankfully has packed textures so I don’t have to remake them just yet.

If this SSD cannot be recovered, I have no fucking idea what I’m going to do. Literally fucking everything that’s important on there has been wiped. All my videos, all my music downloads, all my photos, all my renders, fucking everything.

Yes, I should back stuff up, but I just didn’t think anything like this would happen. Yes, I should’ve taken the SSD out to make sure no data got wiped, but I didn’t know he would wipe everything. Now, I have to start from basically zero and slowly get back to where I was with missing files.

I can download some files from Discord or Cloudflare, but I never store the RAW files because they take up so much space, and I resized them to just 1080p on Cloudflare so that they take less time to load on my website. I can recover some sona art from DMs that hadn’t been backed up in OneDrive, as that hadn’t been updated since August of last year.

I have no fucking idea what I’m going to do without all my pictures. Every single plane I’ve ever gotten a picture of is just fucking gone. I can download some from Discord, but again, no RAW files, just the exported JPEG files that have fucking horrible colour grading because I don’t know what I’m doing when exporting them.

Thankfully, I like to keep the first files I ever keep on my camera itself, so the first few pictures I’ve ever taken are still on the camera, but everything between then and now is fucking gone. I don’t even know how many gigs or how many files I had, at least a few hundred files.

I have no fucking idea what to do. Having an entirely empty 1TB SSD in my computer woukd feel absolutely terrible.

What the fuck was I thinking???