I’ve never installed Mint, but I’ve had a patriot memory stick go bad, and the RMA process involved sending both sticks to Patriot. Never buying from that garbage company again…

Yup, get a recovery/tool ISO and run a memory test.

Should’ve prayed harder.

Same.

Bought a Blu-ray burner and “archive grade” disks for third location backups.

I made a list of files that is just a text document (3MB!) that sits on the root of the Blu-ray. There’s probably a better way of doing that, but it works for me.