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Psychologist Consoles Data Loss Victims
(ok.whatever) writes "A former suicide prevention counselor is employed full-time by a data recovery firm to console its callers. The San Francisco Chronicle reports: 'When the company receives a call from someone who's clearly lost it -- which can happen several times an hour -- Chessin comes on the line to help the caller rediscover their happy place.' Good grief!"
Abuse can be dished out to lines like that very easily, and it's definitely a good idea to have a councellor there in case. It can be important data as well, maybe losing their job for it can make them fall into depression
Also people who have "lost it" generally look to someone to talk to, and maybe a tech support guy can help?
On the whole I can't see any bad coming from it!
Everyone knows the old rule of backup, but sometimes you lose that data. Through too many hard drive switches, unexpected upgrades or whatever.
... a way to remember his mother.
A friend of mine was storing a PBX generated WAV file his mother's voice. It was one of the last times she called his office before she died. During an upgrade the file was lost. The guy just fell to pieces. That WAV file was an emotional security blanket for him
There are jokes about losing porn or MP3s files on this topic, but think about it. How much of your life is in the bits and bytes on your server(s). Maybe it's the pics of your graduation. Maybe it's the thesis you struggled to complete. Maybe it's the love note from your future spouse after you first met.
You're keeping the data for an emotional reason. It makes sense that when you lose that data you're going to be affected.
If you've ever seen someone lose a term paper, multiply that intensity by several times and you can understand how suddenly a tech support person needs to switch to being a counselor, and since many can't do both jobs, it's really good to have someone else on hand. A suicide counselor may be a bit of overkill, but having someone trained at handling very upset and stressed individuals is a really good idea. This is the wave of the future.....
People who lose mp3s and photos aren't generally the type to send their systems to a data recovery center. Do you have any idea what those places cost? No, there's a good reason for having a counselor type there....the kind of people that send their hard drives to them are the kind that are DESPERATE to recover their data for whatever reason...and they could probably use the help.
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nobody is interested in backups. What everyone wants are restores. There is a fine but crucial distinction between both terms. If you don't see it, continue backing up your data on the same DAT tape you've been using for years ;-). I think the counselor can tell a lot about people who did frequent backups and now had to do their first restore.
Yours, Martin
What do you say to someone who kept all of the 25 slide powerpoint presentation, that they've been working on for a month and is due to tommow, on a floppy disk that goes bad? It sucks. You want to say:
"You're an idiot. Why the hell didn't you back it up?
But what really comes out:
"I'm very sorry, floppys are so horrible. If you look at them funny they stop woring. Make sure to email files to yourself. Again, I'm sorry".
I work tech support at a state school and I can't even count the number of students who have started crying. Its gone down in recent years because our admins finally decided to backup/autosave all Microsoft Word (which is one ofthe problems to begin with) documents on every public computer at the school (which is quite a lot) on a file server. That way if the student is in a lab for a few hours and gets a "Word has experienced a problem, your file will be lost" message they can come to the help desk and we can recover whatever was saved. Its really a life saver sometimes (students tend to do stupid stuff when they lose their big paper).
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
You can apply a sociological solution (suicide counseling) to a technical problem (hard drive crash).
Well actually, yes! I'm sure a lot of here have noticed, that when we get people over their fear of technology, their fear of being stupid or breaking it, it is much easier to train/teach them. I have always said, for all I do in tech, that what I do best is hold hands. Let's think about it - if you are in any type of help/admin/trouble/design - when someone calls you they are already in distress. They may have spent who knows how long, so afraid of looking stupid, trying to fix it themselves, making things worse. I have watched grown men pull their hair out, and have had women hug me and cry on my shoulder (real tears!), because they had worked hard all week and lost it all. Before I can do anything for them, I need to calm them down. Sometimes I make them take a break, not to worry, I'll do the best I can - I sound like a doctor half the time. When I train others, I always pass this on - which to me is a most important step. I make a lot friends too, and good word always makes it to the top.
I know others who take a different, very condensending approach, and they really piss me off. But they become hated by those that dared ask for help. And as arrogant as they are, as they look down at the 'fools who broke something' they don't even realize that they make themselves look bad, like they are the ones who really don't know what they are doing.
When switching to a new computer I observed that only about half of my son's old games could be installed. Some of these seemed to be corrupted data problems, so I tried to make fresh copies - only about 30% could be copied. A resurfacing kit helped only a few a them. I finally pinned down the problem: miniscule, barely visible scratches on the TOP of the CD. CDs seem to be relatively immune to bottom scratches, but scratches on the label are fatal - even the tiniest, if it penetrates the ink at all, will permanently destroy the data with no possible recovery.
Our new policy of course is to copy any CD as soon as purchased and safely store away the original. That is, IF they can be copied - the new copy protection stuff worries me. And how about DVDs, and in particular XBox DVDs? Am I supposed to put a child-lock on the XBox and constantly be interrupted when he wants to switch CDs?