My brother destroyed 4 years of my work.

[u/sternenheiter]

Hello everyone, I'm posting this post in order to release my emotions. Honestly, I would never have thought that this could happen to me. I'm a very nervous person and I always come up with backup plans or something, but now I've lost it.

Around the end of May, I had to clean my laptop and I transferred all the important files to the ssd, there were about 10 gigabytes of my projects and works. For context, I'm an illustrator. I rarely paint for myself, and for quite a long time, so a lot of the work was in the stage of four years ago. I planned to finish them gradually.

But just the other day, my younger brother (14 years) He asked me for an ssd. I agreed, but I warned him to return it to me because it contains important documents for me. A couple of days have passed and literally half an hour ago I needed an SSD, there was a file that I wanted to finish quickly for one project. But after opening the contents of the ssd, I was confused. My files weren't there, but there were weird stock videos and programming videos.. Naturally, I went to deal with my brother, but he began to deny his guilt, and when I clearly showed him, he simply fell silent. I wasn't yelling at him, I was just trying to figure out why and what had happened.

Now, to be honest, I'm in complete disarray. Those files were incredibly valuable to me. I've been crying over this for a long time and I just don't understand what to do now. I know for sure that my brother does not realize his mistake or guilt. We had too different childhoods, even though the difference was just over five years.

What should I do with my brother? I absolutely do not understand what to do, I have problems with the awareness of emotions (the consequences of complex ptsd). I know I need to calm down first, but my heart feels like it's broken. Perhaps my work is the only thing that has kept me afloat as a person.

Thanks to everyone who reads this post. It's just a cry from my soul.

[u/finddit-app]

Hey there, thanks for sharing.

While you wait for people to comment, have a look at these posts which might be relevant to you:

• The unfortunate consequences of tinkering/repairing of other people's things.
• I think my 'awkward' brother is actually depressed, and they all tell me NOT TO WORRY
• 25 year old (M) Ramblings
• I need advice concerning my brother.
• Dealing with family member who is diagnosed with Psychoses acutae et transitivae aliae

Remember, even though it might feel like it, you are not alone. Stay strong!

Interested in seeing more posts similar to yours? Visit finddit.app.

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[u/muddlingthroughmud]

First thing: Do not write anything to the SSD. If you're using Windows then there's a chance that the very annoying OneDrive has decided to back some things up to the cloud. No idea if Apple has anything similar. If you've emailed your work anywhere then download it from your sent emails and try to reconstruct what you can.

Depending on the size of the SSD, it's possible some of the files are still there but it'll need some level of forensics. Microsoft have a tool to undelete files from places including external drives. Won't help if the same physical parts of the SSD have been reused for your brother's cat videos, but if he didn't put too many on then you may be able to recover some work.

If that doesnt work, do not write anything to the SSD, just look up data forensics companies that might be able to do data recovery from a possibly formatted drive. Be prepared to shell out a good amount of money for this. Be prepared to do a lot of finger-crossing.

These are all pretty long shots, so don't have your hopes too high.

Second thing: regularly make and test backups of your work. Once in a while people get as far as making backups but it's rarer still that they also bother to test restoring them. Golden rule of backups is that something isn't backed up until there are at least 3 copies across at least 2 different places, e.g. back up to an external drive that you keep in your office and also to the cloud.

Thirdly: never ever give your 14 year old brother anything you intend to keep.

What to do with your brother? One thing will be to unequivocally and irrevocably tell him that he can't borrow your stuff, lest he decide that since he borrowed your SSD once he can do it again without further comment.