Relieved to report my backup strategy works

Well, so my hard drive failed. It's not the first time one died on me, but it is the first time it happened in my daily driver PC. By chance, I had looked at the SMART stats maybe a month ago, and nothing out of the ordinary was reported. A few days ago I wanted to check if my backups are all up-to-date, when this happened:

Notice how baffled Windows was: The drive was visible in Explorer, but not in Disk management. (I have restarted a few times to see what happens; this was the case about half the time. The other times no drive was displayed at all.)

My first thought was "well, it was 10 years old" followed by "darn, drives are expensive." Then I noticed that it's probably a good sign that my reaction wasn't "aaaargh, how will I get my data back?!"

After getting a replacement drive I've restored everything from the NAS, and so far it seems I didn't lose anything important. The worst data loss so far was that I lost a draft of this readme and had to start over. 😁

Here's to hoping the new drive also lasts at least a decade; and that my 10-year-old GPU doesn't die yet, since those are even more expensive than hard drives. 🤞🏻