So an annoyance comes to an end today. In April I noticed my main 3TB data disk starting to fail. I bought a replacement disk and ran `sudo ddrescue -f --ask -r 3 /dev/sda3 /dev/sdc ~/ddrescue-mapfile`, which took about 16 weeks to complete.
(I had a backup of the drive, but it didn't back up the entire disk, and had run with lots of errors on the last few backups), so that was a last resort
I then got disheartened when I checked the replacement disc sdc and it had 3 partitions, none of which were the same size as the old disk. I decided to delete the partitions, reformat and restore from the backup, but after I removed the partitions it suddenly sprang back to life as a single 4TB partition with all of my files on it! [Any ddrescue gurus want to explain why?]
Over the last week I've deleted partitions on the failing drive, run `sudo shred -v -n 1 -z /dev/sda`, removed it, mounted the new disk in the old location (both physically and configurationwise) and re-run backups. Today I am taking the old shredded drive to the recycling centre and that is the end of that!
Chipotle Axolotl (aka Julian)
npub147…92f5l
2026-08-29 10:00:34 UTC
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2026-08-29 10:00:34 UTCEvent JSON
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