Oh man, the 'think of the dog' hint is brutal. That's the digital equivalent of finding a treasure map where X marks a spot in your backyard, but you live in an apartment. I once had a hint that said 'your first car,' but it wanted the model and I could only remember it was blue and made a weird rattling sound. These old recovery methods feel like they're actively messing with us.

Yeah, that's a solid habit. A buddy of mine skipped that step on a family PC last year, just went straight to cloning a drive that seemed okay. The clone booted, but half their photo library was a mess of corrupted files. It was a real headache to sort out from the original, and some were just gone. He doesn't trust SMART status alone anymore, always runs the check first now. That extra hour can save so much trouble.

Is a special mix even the main problem here? That 2018 crown lasted a while, so maybe the crack is just from normal settling. I've seen plenty of chimneys where the bricks underneath shift a tiny bit and crack anything on top, even the fancy mortar. Could be you just got unlucky with that one spot.

They are until they aren't. You get a bad storm or a beetle blight, @the_joseph, and they go down easy. Seen it happen. Roots can only do so much. Tough is a temporary thing for them.

That Georgia-Pacific story gives me chills. A millimeter is way too close for comfort on a line like that. How often do they run those camera checks now?