lol that’s all Greek to me but thanks, I’ve made a note to try and figure it out.

Basically it was my own lack of planning and consistency. I was too lazy or distracted to backup consistently, head full of whatever I was busy with, or gave/lent my backed-up-on-cd music collection to someone else I didn’t stay in contact with. Then my computer would get a virus or a component would break and that was it. Or I lost stuff in moves, or a hard drive I kept to try and salvage later got irreparably damaged in storage.

I still have some kept drives I might try to get data off when I figure out how to do it safely. I know there are a few ways of doing data recovery and I have at least once managed to get a computer going again with a bootable Linux usb just long enough to grab the important stuff. I’ve even used it to rescue scan and find viruses that hid from the AV. Another time I manually put the drive in a drive enclosure.

But with some it might still be risky. I know at least one forces you to enter your Microsoft password to log in (at least while in the computer) which I don’t want to do on a compromised device. I haven’t tried to see if the Linux usb can bypass that or if that’s guarded against. I’m also not sure if there’s any ‘protections’ against accessing data while the drive is out of the machine but I do know that stuff exists with some hard drives so we will see.

Anything I know about computers I had to teach myself, so despite trying to catch up there’s knowledge gaps and lack of experience with some things.

Idk the old drives aren’t urgent. I think for now I’ll focus on getting anything important and possibly time sensitive downloaded to local and then back it up to the hard drive I have, and the hard drives can wait til I have the brain space to deal with it.