I have a junk drawer in my /home directory. It is called RPMS (for ancient reasons that I don't recall).
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It contains lots of junk. Code fragments, old packages, odds and ends, Nvidia driver packages, a unix Galaga game that I amused myself porting a long time ago...just odds and ends that I sometimes find useful...general cyber-clutter.
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So, a couple of days ago, it vanished.
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I didn't do it. I have no idea what happened. The directory was still there, and some of the sub-directories. But all files were gone and the sub-directories that I looked in also had no files.
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My /home is hosted on an SSD, and this makes me think the SSD did something strange. Dunno.
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Well, it's just a junk drawer...do I care that much? I thought about it...but I do often enough root around in the junk drawer looking for something or other, so I decided that maybe I should put it back.
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I looked in the backups, and discovered it had been gone for 3 days before I discovered it. And, of course, I discovered it because I had gone into the junk drawer to root around for something. The backup copy from 4 days back had it.
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So, I restored it. Took 30 seconds or so.
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Now, the world would not have ended if I lost the contents of the junk drawer. But there are many other directories in /home where loss would be catastrophic.
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Good thing I had a backup, huh?
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So, do you - the person reading this - have everything backed up? If not, what are you going to do when one of your directories vanishes?