While cleaning my room today I accidentally switched the power adapter of my external harddrive from a 12 volt one to a 24 volt one... 1.5TB harddisk destroyed. Watashi wa baka desu. -___-
Fortunately(1) I had a backup and fortunately(2) there was only 200gb of data on it. Unfortunately(0) the backup is three months old. I am a sad panda.
Evening update: it seems that there is no way I can revive my harddisk. I tried removing it from the external case and I put it inside the case as an internal harddisk, but the PC just refuses to even start. Must be shortcircuiting or something.
Lesson learned. Back when I lived in Holland (three years ago already o_0) I was always very careful with my data, making sure that I always had a backup of everything. I also had my most important data on a drive running in RAID 1 mirroring so that even if one drive crashes, I would not lose any data. After coming to Japan that determination weakened a bit, and now my carelessness has finally paid its toll.
Another thing that bothers me is that I don't even know exactly what I'm missing! A lot happens in three months, and I don't remember what I did and what changed during that time. To prevent this from happening again I am now running a simple indexing script on all my harddisks, so I can always remember what files were on my harddisk at any given point in time.
I've ordered an external RAID enclosure and two new 1.5TB harddisks. I'm a bit worried that the raid case will only have a manual in Japanese, and it might be hard to get a replacement if it's the raid case that breaks instead of the harddisk, but even if that happens I'll be able to somehow get my data out. Safety first. I wouldn't want to lose all my photos..