Cheers, didn’t really get taught any of this. Haha no pr0n.exe downloads! Just past lack of education about net safety or didn’t shell out for good AV, or maybe forgot regular updates.

Most are various laptop drives within the 15 year old range. I forget what connections.

It happened to the desktop a few times but I just shelved the old drive for later retrieval, put in fresh drive and installed OS again…😶 Seaview, maybe SATA. Replaced it with a SSD. I’d have to find it.

Fingers crossed that’s it’s not the heads because that’s actual physical damage I think. But it’s usually that something else broke, or there was something bad on there I didn’t trust I had the skills to completely clean.

Spare pc is a possibility, I just would have to back up and wipe an old laptop and I’m kind of struggling with day to day chores as is. Also it feels like wasting a pc by exposing a safe one if that makes sense?

(Also can you have separate backups on the same external drive? As in you can keep many different versions and from different computers without anything getting overwritten?

I think so but I’ve usually had to kind of just do a quick bandaid solution to get my computer going again, and have had fears of reinfecting by restoring data in the wrong way.)

I could buy a raspberry pi as they’re cheap but I don’t know if I have the brain cells for the learning curve rn.

It should be ok. I just need to back up social media pics locally first, then grab the stuff from other cloud storage, and then back the computer/s up. (And try to grab contact info of establish an outside connection in case social media requires ID in like a year.) The drives are sitting there and hopefully won’t get damaged or lost before I can get to them.