My first data loss incident: back in 2014.
My last data loss incident: January 2025. Got to know about it in April 2025.
I normally keep a backup my mobile contents (Photos, videos, call recordings etc.) in my PC. I admit, I do not do it regularly, but maybe about once in every two months or so. My mobile backup dates back to 2014. Every time I do a backup, I copy it over to the existing backup, so it gets added to the files that are already there. I do not keep everything on my phone because of storage space issue (Phone only has 512GB).
Back in last January, I was backing up everything because I want to upgrade the RAID5 array to a RAID6, with more drives. I thought I might as well do a new backup of my mobile. I was doing a lot of things together, moving data out of the RAID5 to different drives (I am always running short of drives lol), and I made a mistake. Instead of adding the new backup, I just backed it up on a different drive, forgot to move the old backup completely.
Everything went fine, RAID6 is up and running, I moved all the data back in RAID6 successfully. About two weeks ago, I suddenly realized that I didn't merge the mobile backup. AND IT HIT ME. I've lost all mobile contents that I had backed up except what I have in my mobile. And because I did not have enough spare drives, and the 3 x 20TB that I ordered was a month late, I had to use the Backup versioning drive for moving a good amount of data out of the RAID5. So I have no way of getting it back. RAID5 is gone, same drives and a few more drives were configured in RAID6, fully initialized and then all the data were brought back in, so running recovery won't help.
I ran recovery on the USB SSD that I use to back up my mobile, but I only just started using it for about six months, and it wouldn't have the old files. Most important things on the old mobile backup were the photos and the call recordings, conversations of some family members and others who are not here anymore. I still ran recovery, but nothing was there, in fact not even new files that were on the SSD a month ago. I guess trimming / garbage collection did its job properly. I ran recovery on every other single drive I used for backing up RAID5 data, none had anything in them.
I gave up. I was depressed, sad. It went into background, but it was a horrible feeling.
And then, after a few days I suddenly remembered that I used to use a SanDisk MicroSD for mobile backup back when Samsung mobiles used to have a MicroSD slot. I went through a pile of stuff in my drawer and managed to find it. It was a 400GB SanDisk Extreme PRO MicroSD.
I downloaded the SanDisk Rescue PRO Deluxe and used the license key that I wrote down in Evernote. Activated it and ran a recovery. The card was last used back in 2021, when I upgraded to S21 ultra as soon as it came out. 4 years without being used or without power, I had no hope.
Guess what? After a two hour of running recovery, the software found some 52,000 files with all the images, call recordings, videos etc. and almost all of them are working, except they don't have their original filenames and all metadata is gone. But the files are working. I am going through a duplicate search (byte searching) and sort them as I go. It is going to take a long time, but at least I have the files.
TL, DR: ALWAYS HAVE A BACKUP VERSIONING COPY, YOU NEVER KNOW WHEN YOU ARE GOING TO NEED AN OLD BACKUP.
