I just discovered something I did so idiotic I need a stronger adjective that what is in my name.
For one of my installs, I accidentally overwrote my 1TB HDD. A few minutes ago I wanted to put back some files... and all I saw was a distro.
It confused me because I was not sure if I was on my solid state drive or the HDD.
So, those files are gone. A lot is gone. Nothing too precious, I think... It might be a tremendous fuck up.
See kids, this is why you back up. Off the computer. Oh well.
EDIT: Recovering files using Photorec. Everyone who recommended this to me is a hero. Also a hero is the person who recommended FTK, but I was too eager to use something now than to sign up to download. I still should though...
Accidentally flashed a live image (PCBSD, IIRC) onto my 1TB external HDD instead of the thumb drive. Lost years of collected music and movies that night. I learned two things:
Don't do this sort of thing in the middle of the night, when you're tired and should be sleeping.
Late to the party but this why I like Ventoy. It only looks for removable drives and then all you do is drag and drop your live images onto the removable drive. Pretty hard to mess anything up.