Quote Originally Posted by The UnIntelligible View Post
You.

In all seriousness at least in the end you managed to retrieve it (partially).
I'd configured APC to cache content for 24 hours, so luckily I was able to write a small script to fetch all of the content that had been viewed today (still lost previous work, but it's data I hadn't viewed for a while and isn't important).

Quote Originally Posted by Thomas View Post
Setting the mood. Back in 2008 I had just received my first computer that was to be exclusively used by me. It didn't take long for me to figure out I'd be needing an external hard drive, so I purchased a 160Gb Seagate external drive. Naturally, my family took advantage of the drive and backed up all their cameras and phones pictures onto there. Afterwards, they would totally wipe their SD card.

Fast forward to late 2008, I discovered linux. Once I figured out how to burn the iso to a dvd, I reboot and install it. Back then, I didn't know much of computers. So naturally, I choose the external drive as the target disk. Sure enough, I come to find out the drive's been formatted, erasing almost every digital picture me family's taken over the past five-ish years.

And that kids, is why I'm the man I am today.

Side note: To this day, I name my external drive "Seagate" and assign it drive letter "H". In memory of the formatted disaster.
I once accidentally did the exact same (though my HD was loaded with movies/tv shows/music, etc.). If you spot it fast enough you can recover the data easily with free software.