Ok, so yesterday I installed a new M2 SSD with the express intent of having more room for distro hopping. I installed Pop_OS/Cosmic edition yesterday to the new nvme. This morning I thought, well I should have a MUSL Void installation, so I started in installing it. And you know…when you have more than one NVME drive, those device names look a lot alike (nvme0n1 and nvme1n1) and I suffered early morning syndrome/dementia/etc, and clobbered the older drive. Stopped about half way, but yeah…too late.
So, a full round of Endeavouros/Cachy reinstalls for the daily driver disk. I shouldn’t complain, it keeps me fresh and remembering any tweaking I needed/wanted to do. It’s also a way to get rid of clutter 
However, it makes me feel old and less bright.
I can relate a lot to this, part of the reason I have left this install so cluttered
BTW I wouldn’t relate it to age or intelligence, I would just say if like me these days just not something that is second nature anymore
Well it also made me refresh ISOs on the Ventoy thumb drive. So MANY unexpected benefits 
Always helps to keep them up to date hey
I’d recommend using partition labels instead of those (more or less cryptic) /dev/* names… 
Yeah I learned that (and yes I labeled everything after the failure)
Not like this hasn’t bitten me before, but I never took the time to label till earlier this morning.
Thats like the time I thought I had already changed disk for installing a new system and while I was getting the new system installed I was playing with the disk I wanted to install it on and it dawned on me that I had just 
up and whipped out a daily system.
I stopped smoking weed for a whole five minutes after that 
BTW, especially when messing with partitions often, having a decent and tested backup system of one’s personal data is really worth the while.
Then it is much safer to accidentally overwrite partitions.
For sure, backup, backup, backup as they say (add in 1 more, never hurts)
Naah, as long as you don’t keep data in the OS partitions, no big deal to reinstall :0
which is why i only stopped for 5 minutes instead of 10 
Not sure if you mean sarcasm, but if not, then I’d tip it is so easy to overwrite the precious data partition as well… (done that, been there…)
Years ago a colleague of mine tried to make a backup and accidentally overwrote his nearly finished dissertation from his only backup disk.
He had to rewrite most parts of his dissertation. I don’t recall how much time he had to use for the rewrite, but the following weeks he kept himself strictly in his room, obviously rewriting.
Yeah one backup isn’t a backup. I knew someone who’s work laptop was stolen and unfortunately he had his backup usb drive in it at the time so he lost the only backup for it as well. So he had to start over. People were very upset and rules were made.
which is why we backup, backup, backup (and one more backup) and make sure some of these are external and seperate from your system
1 copy is still a backup but a pretty weak form, a recent example I can give is when I was compressing the game I was working on - if I had relied on the compressed form without testing I would have lost all of what led me up to what I have now as the compressed file was always corrupt for some reason I didn’t really care about only reason I compressed was so I could copy 1 file instead of 20,000
EXACTLY.
As for my personal data, files, images, documents, etc… ALL are backed up 4 ways. Two physical drives (one external SSD and one USB flash drive) and two cloud services (Dropbox and Mega). I’ve not lost ANY personal data, files, images, documents in well over a decade.
yeah got to love compression sometimes. I keep both a compressed and a uncompressed copy. The uncompressed copy is my “weak” copy. I take the extra few minutes after compressing to uncompress to ensure a good quality backup do to my experience of learning the hard way.
Yer after I had a few failures/corrupt copies I always test them now before calling it a backup
Yep, I have important files in several different places. I’m covered .