Not long ago I discovered backups don't do any good if you delete them. The incident went down while I was wiping out my hard drive to do a fresh install of Fedora. I believe what happened may have been due to sleep fatigue.

Everything is a bit hazy. At one point in my wandering on the command line I found the mount point for my external backup drive. "What's this doing here?" and decide to remove it.

At some point I woke up in a panic and yanked the usb drive off the my laptop. Heart pounding. "Oh shit."

I actually felt like I was going to get sick. Tax records, client contact info, you name it, all gone. Except, basically, the pictures of my kids, mozilla profile, and my resume files.

While I reconstructed some of the missing files there a bunch that would be nice to have back. All of the business records though have had to be reconstructed by hand. By the next day I did realize I really only cared about the pictures of my kids in the end. And those were somehow saved from my blunder.

Work flow change: backup drive is only connected to laptop while backups are being made or restored. Disconnected at all other times. A third backup drive for backups of backups is on the todo list.