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Lost my 2TB Seagate HDD yesterday which was seemingly perfectly healthy. While copying large amounts of data (~60GB), there was a sudden set of low noises. I had no idea where it was coming from, and I thought maybe its coming from outside my house. Turns out the was the hard drive and it stopped working within 30 seconds after that. Machine froze, had to restart and the drive didn't work after that. It now identifies itself as ST_M13FQBL 4.4GB (known scenario: https://linustechtips.com/topic/606709-hard-disk-name-suddenly-change-to-st_m13fqbl-ata/, not easy to recover, if at all). I think maybe the drive got too hot or something (many cabinets now connect hard drives at the back/top, where they don't get cooling from the fans) and decided that was it.

Just a reminder, to be protective of your important data. Please do keep it backed up (cloud or at least locally - on a secondary device). Even if its just something important you are temporarily working or, like a project you need to submit over the Weekend (back it up every day at least). You can lose data at anytime without warning (theft/hardware fault/accidental deletes/electric surges/data corruption/ransomware/reversed connectors/shock/angry family member/bear attacks...whatever).

You don't want to lose the only photos of your loved ones, or only copies of some documents or projects you have made. I have seen many posts here where people have asked for help after losing data they claim is very important and irreplaceable to them. With large drive sizes, losing even say 500GB to 1TB of potentially important data, can be a big loss.

Thankfully my important data is backed up, and I did not lose anything worthwhile hopefully. Can't even remember what some of the Folders were there on the various partitions. Wish there was a way to see a cached copy of the folder structure somehwere.

Side note: I wish I had listened to u/DCGMechanics's wise cooling tips and would not have to deal with this now. https://www.reddit.com/r/IndianGaming/comments/uzilq2/guys_is_it_okhe_to_put_half_filled_water_plate/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share