I’m trying to do that; but all of the newer drives i have are being used in machines, while the ones that arent connected to anything are old 80gb ide drives, so they aren’t really practical to backup 1tb of data on.

It’s possible to make that work; through discipline and mechanism.

You’d need like 12 of them but if you’d carve your data into <80GB chunks, you could store every chunk onto a separate scrap drive and thereby back up 1TB of data.

Individual files >80GB are a bit more tricky but can also be handled by splitting them into parts.

What such a system requires is rigorous documentation where stuff is; an index. I use git-annex for this purpose which comes with many mechanisms to aid this sort of setup but it’s quite a beast in terms of complexity. You could do every important thing it does manually without unreasonable effort through discipline.

For the most part i prevented myself from doing the same mistake again by adding a 1gb swap partition at the beginning of the disk, so it doesn’t immediatly kill the partition if i mess up again.

Another good practice is to attempt any changes on a test model. You’d create a sparse test image (truncate -s 1TB disk.img), mount via loopback and apply the same partition and filesystem layout that your actual disk has. Then you first attempt any changes you plan to do on that loopback device and then verify its filesystems still work.

Linux its just / then from there you can mount other drives at whatever directory you want

I know root / exists but I didn’t know a good analog to C:. Thank you though as some other members might not know it yet :)

But also 100€ ain’t all too cheap for some of us

Certainly. But nowadays even reputable brands bring out >1TB SSD/HDDs for little money.
They should suffice for backup purposes.
If the money is that tight when even a dedicated drive + backupsoftware won’t fit then you can only bridge the time until then with a USB drive or something else with a high enough capacity.
And any (working) backup is better than none.

ls -r actually lists entries in reverse order! It needs -R as well.

cp and rm accept either.

Looking at some man pages the only commands I found where -R didn’t work were scp and gzip where it doesn’t do anything, and rsync where it’s “use relative path names”.

(Caveat: BSD utils might be different, who knows what those devils get up to!)

I accidentally scrambled all the permissions on my home directory by running sudo chmod -R -755 .

The -R does this recursively through out every sub directory under /home/user/

While this looks somewhat innocent and harmless, most (if not all) files on home directory are owned by normal user. The above command just changed all files ownership to root (privileged user) which has alot of nuisance.

Effects:

1. To run any app now, you need to open a new terminal and type sudo -E app-name &, every single time. Annoying, but not as much as the following effects…
2. Running apps this way is not recommended since the app might accidentally change your system configurations without remorse, as it’s launched with root privileges (eg. network sockets, of which might most certainly be used by another app or daemon) and lead into hundreds of popups telling you that some system app terminated unexpectedly (without any reason whatsoever! Now you have to hunt that reason out on dmesg or sm’n). This can and WILL certainly lead to Linux crashes.
3. Due to effects on 2. Above, most apps (eg. Android studio) WILL prevent you from launching it with root privileges, by quiting itself immediately when it detects that privileged user is owner of the application process. So you will wind up with apps that you might never use again 😕

It’s a world pain by a thousand tinny cuts.

Hope this answers all your questions, and yes, it’s -R, not -r

Solutions:

1. Be extra extra careful while running sudo commands, especially those with -R (recursive) options. Are you on a right directory? ( I thought I was, turns out I wasn’t)

in addition to above, I would try to avoid using ., and specify the particular directory using ~/path/to/dir. So, instead of sudo chmod -R -755 ., I could have used sudo chmod -R -755 ~/path/to/dir

2. timeshift to the rescue. Backup your home directory (except Downloads and Video folders), preferably weekly, (or daily if you change your system configurations more frequently)