Panicing Led to Losing My Desktop

Okay, I need to take a verbal note about what I did and what I should have done in trying to recover my desktop environment. So I had a backup based on restic for my home directory, but it was really lazy and I never really learned it. and that home directory got too big for where I was going to end up restoring it to. So my current system was on a 4 terabyte drive and I was gonna have to drop to a 500 gig with a 2 terabyte external attached storage. Now the makeup of my desktop was a 4 terabyte SSD that was going bad. A 500 gig SSD, that was going to be my new operating system boot disk, a 2 terabyte disk that I never started using as storage but wanted to and then forgot about. But then the kicker is a 4 terabyte rust disk as well, which was a ZFS pool. And so what I did is I live booted into an Ubuntu server environment, mounted my home directory from the 4 terabyte SSD, and tried to continue my rustic backup to my NAS, like an idiot. But then I also tried to prune it by only backing up like a few projects because I was getting worried about time. But then over the course of the whole thing, it's taken me now, you know, over a week to solve this. So this has just been a ridiculous waste. So I downloaded open code and had it help me write the right excludes and stuff, just write in my RESTIC backup script and got it back up going. And now I have failed to install POP or Ubuntu onto the new disc, but I reinstalled Aurora onto the new 500 gig disk and realized I don't have Firefox tabs. My SSH keys are in that Restic backup. Everything is in that rustic backup. But you know what I have is I have that 2 terabyte disk mounted just fine as a ZFS dataset. And what I should have done was just our synced everything from the 4 terabyte SSD in my home directory to the 2 terabyte disk. which I had already formatted as a ZFS data, as a Z pool with data sets. So I could have made a data set for my home directory right then and there and could have just R synced everything. attached it here in the new Aurora instance, Arcing to everything back over, kind of done a little switcheroo with the direction of the back up there, or just flushed it and started the new one, and I'd be up and running. And anyway, I guess would also conclude the discussion of what I should have done, which is that. I should, and oh, and a detail I left out is after the Ubuntu live desktop environment, and before the Aurora install is I removed the 4 terabyte disk from the motherboard, which was like a full PC tear down. And that had to happen because I wasn't really able to boot anywhere, because that 4 terabyte disk had some bad blocks that were inhibiting the boot process. With everything I was loading as it was like trying to, you know, do disk discovery or whatever, I think anyway, that disk was holding everything up. When I finally got it to Aurora, I didn't have the old one to just mount an R sync two, and I just feel so ridiculous that I had that 2 terabyte and the 4 terabyte disk that I completely have failed to even utilize in this whole situation, the spinning rust, to have uses a backup target. All local, didn't even have to go to my house at all, didn't have to use the network at all. Yeah, just feel so stupid about it.