I agree w what others have said. Just some personal background: started with Ubuntu (well technically I started with Suse, then then Ubuntu). But I found on the server, Ubuntu required a lot of manual upkeep. Debian was just always worked, never had to think twice about it.

Debian

This was me, except I went straight from Ubuntu to Debian. At some point I wondered why I was doing all this manual maintenance. I realized that Ubuntu relies on Debian and so I switched. Haven’t looked back.

I get a lot of folks are correctly pointing out the need to back up data but isn’t that a little bit of victim blaming? This isn’t a situation where the guy had a 10 year old drive with all his photos and videos sitting around unbacked up. He had a new drive and it failed. Can we agree that brand new drives aren’t supposed to fail?