Fortunately, every piece of data was recovered successfully. My initial decision to experiment with bootrec.exe at the most critical moment of this incident instead of using a tool I have used in the past and trust (Testdisk) made me very skeptical about how I handle situations like this. Also, I should have followed some standard procedures like creating an image of the whole disk before trying any kind of data recovery.

As for skipping daily backups without reason, I can assure you that this is an unexplained behavior of mine too! During the last years, I’ve written numerous backup scripts, but I always focused on some machines I used as servers. Backing up my desktop or laptop had always been a low priority task. But, I’ll set some new priorities from now on.

Also, I think I will have to reduce the number of computers that lay around at home to the absolute minimum. That should make things more clear regarding which kind of data is important and which is not.

I try to keep daily backups of my laptop (pretty much the only machine left around here). But I’m also guilty of often skipping the daily backups for 5-6 days in a row. I know that this is a silly thing to do, but I still do it. To make things ‘easier’ I have scripted my backup process, so all it takes is a daily run of:

sudo /root/backup.sh 1

for a full level 1 dump of all my partitions, and

sudo /root/backup.sh 2

for a level 2 incremental dump of all the files modified since the last level 1 dump.

Yet, I still skip some backups. Go figure…