This is a follow-up of my last rant: https://devrant.com/rants/1323422/...

TLDR; My step-son tripped over my HDD power cord, sending it plummeting towards certain death.

So this is just over a year ago. At this point, my GF and I are married, and she's about 7 months pregnant with our daughter. Her son, Nicolas - the one from the last rant - is 13 years old.

So it was a Saturday, and I had Nicolas helping me to clean up the apartment. My wife was off the hook, because, ya know - she's pregnant.

While I was cleaning the living room, I had Nic cleaning the kitchen/dining room area. At this same time, I had my laptop and a 3Tb external USB hard drive on the dining room table, copying a bunch of data or something. This external HDD also had it's own power cord, which was plugged in next to the table.

Next thing I know, I hear an "Ohp!" followed by a crash. It was the horrifying sound of my hard drive plunging 36 inches off the table towards certain death. And death, it had.

Before even checking, I knew this HDD was dead. It took a lot for me not to snap at the kid. I told him to get out of the kitchen and go clean his room. That hard drive... hadn't been backed up. At all, which is on me. Even more so, since that data was really irreplaceable.

Even knowing that the HDD HAD to be dead, I still plugged it in, hoping for a miracle. I got nothing, it wouldn't even spin up.

$ dmesg -w

Showed that linux saw the USB controller and even the HDD controller (it printed out the manufacturer, SeaGate). The data was valuable enough that I was saving up some money to have the data recovered, which would be about $2,000.

However, before I had saved up enough money... My apartment was broken into and all my external HDD's (and some internal ones I had laying around) were stolen.