tl;dr – If you take anything away from this post, back up your data to an external drive.
Please learn from my mistakes
Another post, another ‘I haven’t posted properly in a while introduction’.
I just wanted to do an update, since I actually have something to talk about – data loss.
The past couple of weeks, I’ve lost a lot of data – some through my own fault and clumsiness – and some of them weren’t, and I want to talk about those first and segue into the events that as far as I’m concerned weren’t so much.
It has been a few weeks where I’ve actually had such a string of bad luck, that it has to be a cosmic message to tell me to change my ways, or a divine digital reset to force me onto a new path with my life.
YouTube account terminated
The first was that I received an email out of the blue that my YouTube channel that I had been working on for a few years had been terminated, for spam or scamming.
I don’t know exactly what it was that I had purportedly done for them to make this decision, and reaching out to Team YouTube on Twitter was as helpful as one would expect.
I have a suspicion that a policy change was implemented, and the content I had been uploading had retroactively flagged with that policy, and found to breach it.
I uploaded a lot of colourisations of TV shows and movies, and maybe they thought because I uploaded them without context, I was claiming to be the person that had made them.
When trying to find out what had happened, I was met with the same stock, automatic replies that most small creators are met with when they are faced with the same situation, and never received an answer.
My appeal was met with the same level of automation, and I had received a response within 15 minutes – it is quite clear that no human had even looked at my appeal.
My experience with both the appeals process, and their social media team is one that many people will also have endured: when it comes to terminating channels, they are the judge, jury and executioner before I had even entered the courtroom. It’s their website, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
The long and short of it is that I’m done with YouTube; since if I create another channel, this faces closure for ban evasion.
Suffice to say I have cancelled my YouTube Premium subscription, so that will save me £13 per month at least.
Migration to Rumble
Thankfully, I set up synchronisation of my channel with another video sharing platform, Rumble – which does seem to have retained the majority of videos that I had uploaded over the years, so I am thankful for that.
Given that most of my existing content is already here, I will most likely continue my uploading predominantly here – I’ve already begun replacing my YouTube links on this site to Rumble videos so that the site works as expected.
I appreciate that the audience on Rumble is very different to YouTube, and I’m unsure how well I’ll do as a content creator on there, but as long as I can link the videos here, I’m happy for now.
PC Crash
This happened just the other day, out of the blue – whilst watching a video, my Windows 11 PC started misbehaving – and Blue Screened with the error code CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED.
I’ve no idea what happened, but when I had loaded it the next day and managed to boot into Automatic Repair, found that the partition it was on had errors – which chkdsk reported that there were errors on the drive, and it had apparently repaired them – but I was just unable to boot into Windows after that.
Honestly, I had been having BSOD errors with Windows for a few weeks before and could not understand what was causing it.
I should let it be known that I do not use CrowdStrike – which caused an outage of Windows machines worldwide just a month ago.
I opted to install Linux, because at this point – booting from Live USB was my only option, and intended to run Linux as my sole OS.
I have a separate nVME drive that houses all my documents and data, so no biggie if I have to reinstall the OS.
Wrong. Not anymore.
nVME Drive
So everything I had that was vaguely important was on a separate nVME hard drive, and as long as that was OK – I didn’t care too much about reinstalling the operating system because at least most of the sentimental stuff was on another drive. This drive.
When I went to install Linux off the Live USB stick, it hadn’t recognised my Windows partition at all, only the nVME drive – so when I went to install it, it asked me if I wanted to install it to the drive it opted to, I (absently mindedly) clicked Yes.
This is the part that’s my fault, because I hadn’t read the message properly, and it wanted to install to nvme0n1p1 instead of one of the /dev/sda devices and clicked Yes – which instantly nuked my NTFS partition with everything on it, and said ‘EXT4 file system creation failed’ – but it was too late, the drive had been wiped.
I have a lot of the content backed up onto an external drive, relating to past YouTube videos I’ve made for my now defunct channel, but the things I had kept on that drive were sentimental things that I wanted immediate access to.
At this point in time, I am not sure what I have lost – probably things I can get access to via the cloud, emails or instant messages and the websites I had purchased assets from, but it was all so well organised on this drive!
The Windows partition
I still have this partition on my 1TB drive, and just opted to install Linux on this drive, and if I’ve lost anything, I’ve lost it – but being able to boot into Windows Recovery Mode, I could access the C drive from the command prompt, and by some miracle of grace, my Unreal Engine was installed to this drive – which still had my Projects folder.
The main thing I was concerned about is the Sheffield game that I had been working on for years – there it was, still there.
I breathed as much of a sigh of relief as my asthma would allow.
The Blender file I used for the map however was gone, but I was able to download a copy of it from 2020 from this website.
Thankfully, past me had had the foresight to upload a copy here, that I could continue to use.
Installing Linux
Since the nVME drive was now empty, I decided to install Linux onto it, so I at least had a working computer – and could always use PhotoRec on the drive to try to restore files, which did work – kind of.
It found a load of files, but not in their original file structure, so I now have a folder full of randomly named files that it had restored on my 1TB drive.
I’m writing this from my PC as we speak, so it is working again – every now and again something pops into my mind to say ‘you’ve lost that’ but it is what it is, it’s only digital data – a lot of it is in the cloud, and I could get it back if I need to – but right now, I’ve had to start from scratch with everything except my passion project – which was the game I’m working on.
Opening the project in Linux is going to be a challenge, but at least I still have that data available safely.
Password Managers
I feel like it’s also important to write a section on Password Managers, if your entire drive gets wiped and you lose access to that browser, the one that remembers all your passwords for you – you’re stuck.
I use (and I’m not affiliated by) Bitwarden – I encourage you to do your own research on something as important as a service that is going to remember your passwords for all of your online identities, but this is the one I use. I have it on my phone, and my second computer – and as long as you remember your email address and master password, installing it is easy.
On the first install, it’s so handy to have it available to remember your Google password, because this opens up everything: Your mail, your video site (that you are now banned from), and your Drive.
What next?
I will come back to the game I am working on, I just don’t know when.
I’ve recently invested in a 3D Printer, so I’m looking to explore what I can do with physical art that can’t be deleted, either by a massive conglomerate on a whim, or myself – accidentally.
If anything, this has taught me how fragile digital data is, and how easily something you have worked on for years can just disappear.
The past couple of weeks have felt like a cosmic intervention, something to make me change my ways and not rely on a computer for your legacy – so I’ve decided to paint more – be it 3D prints, or canvases – because these are the things that the world can’t take away from you at the slip of a button or our tech overlords deciding that they don’t want you on their platform anymore for reasons only known to them.
I’ll read more books, draw things on paper – at least they are physical and permanent.
Also, again. Back up your data to a device that isn’t plugged into your computer all the time.
Same for you, don’t be plugged into your computer all the time.
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