:( silent corruption is the worst ;-; HDDs have a very high capacity but unfortunately have also high failure rates, because well, it's spinning rust ;)
Bit rot is a bit overblown. Most "bit rot" instances are just bit flips in RAM, not defects in the medium. In this scenario the corruption was as non-silent as possible: drive relocated sectors, then refused to mount upon corrupting the XFS log. I have no one to blame but myself.
«Petites soeurs sont les meilleures», mon dieu, tu es fou!
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Oui, mon ami.