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Top 10 Ways To Lose Your Data
bettiwettiwoo writes "The BBC has a article on the Top 10 Ways To Lose Your Data due to the human factor. According to Kroll Ontrack, a recovery firm, the top ten include: laptop being shot in anger (naturally); laptop fell off a moped and was run over by lorry (some laptops just weren't meant to live); server rescued after running unchecked 24/7 for years under layers of dust and dirt; and my personal favourite, laptop dropped in bath while doing company accounts. One of my sister-in-laws apparently repeatedly lost data while writing university assignments by kicking the plug to her desktop out of its socket. It was never really clear to me why she didn't avoid (much) of that problem by using frequent automatic backup, but she didn't. Instead she had her mother pop in at regular intervals to remind her to save manually."
I lost my data using *BSD. I stored it all on the system, and then *BSD died. The only way to get it back is to go to the cemetary and risk a graverobbing rap.
And then there was this 500 Internal Server Error and my wit and wisdom were lost forever to the bit bucket in the sky.
see subject
fp
yoy mean you don't clean a had drive by sticking it in the dishwasher?????
I asked BOFH for more space...
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
Laptop being shot in anger (naturally); laptop fell off a moped and was run over by lorry
;)
Wasn't this a scene in the last Matrix movie?
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
WORD YO!
...are social creatures. They'd much rather have take time out of their own schedule to help them out.
Could this be the first response? Could I be getting a first post?
First Post!
Beware your RAID-0 arrays. Screwing carelessly with these setups can cause you many problems, data interleaving and all that.
Join Tor today!
I think a few pounds of thermite would have worked better. As an added bonus, you'll destroy evidence in the entire house when it burns down! ;)
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
This week, its 10 ways to lose your data.
Next week: 10 ways to get AOL
10 ways to play cards
I once watched Patrick Norton on TechTV open a drive, plug it in, and pour Dr Pepper on the topmost platter as it spun at 7,200 RPM.
I bet everyone in the studio needed a shower afterward.
server rescued after running unchecked 24/7 for years under layers of dust and dirt;
That's a REAL linux server... all you pansies are running clean servers, and Linux should/can run with the big, dirty dogs..
...occurred when I somehow plugged up the power on a 3.5" hard drive incorrectly. I have no idea how this was possible given that the shape of the male and female plugs are keyed to prevent this, but it happened. That was the first (and hopefully last) time that smoke ever came out of my PC. Worst of all, it also toasted every other hard drive sharing the same power supply cable.
3000+ comments meta-modded. 0 mod points awarded.
Lesson for other meta-suckers: Don't believe the hype!
DecafJedi
my weblog: apropos of something
laptop fell off a moped and was run over by lorry... Am I the only one that doesn't know what a lorry is? The strangest thing I have ever seen was a guy that dropped his laptop off a three story building (he was a general contractor). The laptop was toast (in sevral pieces accutally), but I was able to get the data of the HD onto CD.
Common conversation where I work.
I hold up the battered, scratched, often bent laptop with a broken screen.
"So what happened here?"
"Well, I put the laptop on top of my car, and it slid off."
"Slid off."
"Right. Slid right off the roof."
"You didn't happen to, I don't know, drive away, causing this mysterious slippage, did you?"
[ashamed silence]
"I thought so."
--saint
One way to lose data through human factors -- rely on Windows ME
So there are 50 ways to leave your lover but only 10 to lose your data?
My first thought was -- now, that's an odd name. Turkish,maybe?
Now I'm wondering if Havoc Pennington is a person or a company.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
This is not a top ten list, nor is it a top ANYTHING list. In fact, it's no kind of list at all. It is rather a collection of anecdotes intended to remind you, joe linux, how stupid the average user is.
Honestly, put the R back in RTFA.
-theGreater Pedant.
Getting caught by wife...while looking at pr0n.
If a backup is no good, attempting to fix a minor proplem by restoring from it can leave you worse off than when you started.
I know several people who have shot themselves in the foot this way.
If you are so stupid as to work on your laptop while bathing you should die along with the computer. (Darwin Awards!)
Back in 1999 I was a n00b to linux. I was reading a manual which said to type rm -rf /foodirectory. I accidentally typed rm -rf / foodirectory. I was logged in as root at the time. EVERYTHING was lost.
Of course it isn't a complete list. It doesn't have "Running Windows" on it.
Sure they mention theft by nairobian monkeys, but what about just plain theft by crackheads or competitors. My dad's office was just burglarized and they took only his boxen. Left the monitors, keyboards, etcetera and got away before the cops could respond to the alarm. I guess the real d'oh part is that they did take his external drive which was running an overnight backup.
I hope the ntfs encryption is strong enough to stop whoever it was if they were another lawyer and not just a mfing jackass.
Remember that @%#! paperclip that pops up in MS Office apps reminding you to save after x amount of minutes? Yes, I just publicly admitted to having knowledge of MS applications.
I said I'd try to see what I could do. I carefully cracked the case open and wiped off the sticky gunk with warm water. I then opened another good floppy, replaced the disk with the cleaned and dried formerly gunky disk. I said a brief prayer to the Woz and put it in the computer. Hey presto! We immediately read all of the information and made three copies for her to have. One for her purse, one for her desk and one for her home. I kept the original disk on my office wall labelled "Lazarus" until the day I quit. Ah, the days of multiple grain sized magnetic domains...
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
I'm writing to share a tragic little story.
My Dad has a PC that my sister and I used to use for our homework assignments. One night, I was writing a paper on it, when all of a sudden it went berserk, the screen started flashing, and the whole paper just disappeared. All of it. And it was a good paper! I had to cram and rewrite it really quickly. Needless to say, my rushed paper wasn't nearly as good, and I blame that PC for the grade I got.
I'm happy to report that my sister and I now share an Apple PowerBook. It's a lot nicer to work on than my dad's PC was, it hasn't let me down once, and my grades have all been really good.
Thanks, Apple.
Ellen Feiss
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Maybe number 1 on the list could be: Using a really big magnet.
How does SHE know you don't still have it, eh?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Some guy who went to Nairobi, and left his lappy unattended by an open hotel window.... A Monkey Stole it and then ran off into a tree. (LOL) Then we the guy tries to coax the monkey to give it back, finally yelling at the monkey in fustration...the monkey hucks it away, down it goes to the ground in bits.... omfg that is funny. Monkeys RULE... my brother had his bag of chips stolen by monkeys while he was in India in a similar (but less expensive manner).
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
From the article:
I have lost all my files last month. I was upgrading my computer hard disk. I forgot to back up my data. All my files gone. What a shame, although I have a Masters degree in computer science, I ignored the most basic step to safe guide your data.
Michael Chan, Malaysia
So, this loser with a Masters degree was "upgrading his hard drive" eh? So he took out the old drive and put in a new one, and now he can't find his files? He thinks he lost all of his data??? Maybe someone should tell this genius that yes, you can transfer data from the old drive to the new one....
have never had a problem period. AND I backup frequently just in case. oh who cares.
Funny, I was just surfing around trying to find a more elegant way of doing tape backups on Mac OSX, I got bored and popped back to /. only to see this article.
Anybody have any good (and free, this is a personal system) suggestions for doing archives to a DDS3 drive?
And yes, the "Server" in question here is old enough such that it came with onboard SCSI.
Back when I was 10 and working in good 'ol DOS, I thought a cool trick to play on someone would be to create a little BAT file that attribed everything to +read-only, +hidden, and +system ... *recursivley*, effectively leaving the whole hard drive appearing blank. Of course, being a smart little kid, I wrote another BAT file to un-do the mess.
When the time came to test it out, sure enough, it made *all* the files dissappear... even the ones that could revert my little trick. Oops.
And to top it off, I couldn't get any of the other ATTRIB.EXE files to work off any floppies because of differing DOS versions and corrupt 5.25" disks, so I called it quits and reformatted.
Moral of the story: don't test a desctructive "virus" on the only machine that has the antidote.
Actually it is. If you look closely, there is a sidenote on the lefthand side that contains a top 10 list. Strange way to format the article though
A friend of mine was installing a DVD drive on his friend's computer. While he stepped away for a second to get something, his friend thought it would be a good idea to Swiffer the motherboard because it was "dusty". No data was lost, but that's a really great way to screw up your motherboard. That's an expensive mistake she'll never make again!
where am i a href=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles /A35341-2003Oct16.html
Also, don't forget, these are only the accidents/incidents for machines submitted for recovery. By far the most common way to lose data is probably to lose your laptop in the airport, either forgetting it or having it stolen. I remember reading an article about airport lost and founds getting thousands of these yearly. Considering that few people run encryption, that's an incredible industrial disaster waiting to happen.
Get off my launchpad!
One of my sister-in-laws apparently repeatedly lost data while writing university assignments by kicking the plug to her desktop out of its socket. It was never really clear to me why she didn't avoid (much) of that problem by using frequent automatic backup, but she didn't.
No joke! I have had this happen to me COUNTLESS times at a previous job due to poor placement of the power outlet. And auto-save may save your ass when working in Word or Open Office, I don't know of too many programming editors that auto-save changes, namely because you wouldn't *want* that most of the time ( unless the vi swap file counts, but I wouldn't depend on that! )
Anyone listning who designs cubicles.. PLEASE PLACE THE OUTLETS OFF TO THE SIDE OF THE CUBE INSTEAD OF UNDER THE WORK AREA!
Really it is such a retarded location for the outlet, just begging to be knocked by your foot, yet I still see the cords there all the time. Thankfully, not at my desk anymore!
"Small and lightweight for go-anywhere portability.
>travel lighter"
hehe
Crap! I knew I shouldn't have told her!
I guess if I'm dumb enough to accidentally delete a file...
evil adrian
Trust a computer nerd saying format c: is the road to recovery
The original generic sig.
no text here
... I backup everything to /dev/null, that's okay, right?
When showing some people around your very impressive computer room say: see this! It's a hot plug RAID array for one of our production file servers with a couple of hundred gigabytes of storage. I could just pull any one of these drives out right now and no one would even notice. In fact, let me demonstrate ...
:(
Unfortunatley it wasn't as redundant as he expected
You're a fuckin' troll.
just curious, wouldn't that only kill the circuit? not the smallest particle of dust can touch the platters. heat? nah maybe?
... I just save it all to SourceSafe.
Less Talk, More Beer.
It's on the right in Mozilla.
Nothing to see here; Move along.
I'm glad that Simon and Garfunkel are finally moving into the 21st century.
Don't save your file, kyle
Drop your machine, dean
Rip out the cable, Abel
Just listen to me.
Hit delete, Pete
I don't need to repeat
Theres ten ways to set your data free.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
I once had the joy of supporting users of MS Exchange. For some reason I needed to delete and re-create someones exchange account (as you do). I'd moved all their important exchange folders somewhere during the procedure, deleted, created and moved them back, gave them a call and told them that whatever problem they were having was solved (as you do) and left it at that.
Five minutes later they're on the phone again asking where a whole load of their information is! I log in to their account, have a nose around, find various bits of data in various folders and ask them what the probelm is(as you do). Anyway, like you know from the subject anyway, they'd stored all their important information in the handy "Recycle" bin.
The worst part is that after that I have to defend myself against being blamed for *their* data loss! Duh!
They forgot blowtorch
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
A client today erased his palmpilot by letting the batteries drain, then synced his palm to his desktop. This would work if he hadn't previously set the sync app to overwrite the desktop with the data on the palm.
I used to have a UNIX system (Multibus 10 MHz 68010) that had an 8" floppy disk drive for backing up files. The file backup software would write a track on the floppy and immediately read the track to verify the integrity of the data. This worked fine until some bits in the track selection logic of the floppy drive failed. After that, the drive would position the head on a semi-random track when it received a head positioning command. The backup software continued to run without any reported errors. The problem was discovered when the hard disk was replaced and I attempted to restore the filesystem. Every floppy disk in the backup set was hopelessly scrambled.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
How I lost my data. I spent several months trying to get a Traven tape drive to work in Linux so I could back up my server. I never did get a backup to work. So a few weeks ago the power supply blew and took out both hard drives with all my precious data.
Screw Seagate for saying the Traven had native support in Linux. And screw the hard drive makers for making drives that were killed so easily.
Oh, and screw myself for not giving up on the tape drive and coming up with a backup policy that worked.
-- Will program for bandwidth
***SPLASH***
DAMMIT!!!
----
"Ours was a free culture. It is becoming much less so."-Lawrence Lessig
The computers at my university are running XP, for some reason, probably due to some weird setup, will erase teh usb memory card if it is plugged in when you log in, and try to use it as your working directory. I only ever lost data once this way, and not anything I didn't have a backup of, but I still think it weird that it would delete data without even telling or asking you.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
a computer story that starts out:
"I was not aware that Nairobi has a great problem with monkeys which cause a lot of nuisance."
I remember once, I left my laptop by my window and left for lunch. When I came back I found a monkey sitting at it typing the complete work of Shakespear.
He mis-spelled "thee", stupid monkey.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Silly wench put her brand new 6 k IBM thinkpad on the electric stove while she "powdered her nose", when she came back it was a black smokey mess. :-D I still rib her about it..
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
Using winblows is the #1 way to loose data!
I gather they mean 'ten most unusual' ways of losing data, which would be the exact opposite of a 'top ten' list. But it's hard to tell. Lots of people leave laptops on car roofs, etc, very few people shoot them.
If it was the ten most common ways of losing data, I would expect the most common would be "windows viruses", "user stupidity" and "tech support replacing a perfectly good harddrive that has developed an almost unnoticable whine on the basis that this might one day fail and cause data loss, without making a backup first"
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
...by sending random commands to the hard disk controller. Of course, it was the one and only HD on the PC, and being the typical engineer had no backups. And of course, he sent some command that does a factory reset (or similar) of the whole controller hardware, thereby turning his HD into a large doorstop, losing at least a month's worth of development on that and other projects.
I feel I should add a moral, but that wasn't the first time, and won't be the last, that he lost large quantities of data.
> Instead she had her mother pop in at regular
> intervals to remind her to save manually.
I guess mom was driven by a daemon?
anyway, that's a great cron task to have set up. this opens up nearly limitless vistas. you could have mom also bring a nice drink also, for instance.
dang, and people get all excited when they get some tape drive to do backups. sheesh.
You should have backed it up to Kazaa like that Libby Hoeler girl. :)
Let's see. Had a call once, she couldn't get her computer to work, and her first paper as a freshman in college was about due. Her room mate had used it w/o problem the night before though, but I, 200 miles away, seemed a better person to ask ...
"Is the power on?". The questioning silence was a clue, and I asked the question again, this time receiving a response. "The thing with all the plugs in it is lit up, if that's what you mean"
That was a start, so I asked her to press the power button on the computer itself. After explaining to her it was the largest button on the box without a screen, we were in business.
i remember that article, there were even photos of the whole deal...
:-P
lmao!!!
One of my sister-in-laws apparently repeatedly lost data while writing university assignments by kicking the plug to her desktop out of its socket.
Let me guess. Liberal arts major.
back when win2k beta was out, i decided to try it out.. I converted the drives to ntfs and everything.. after it rebooted a few times, it was installed and all of the sudden.. it wouldnt let me copy files in any way... no copy/paste, no drag/drop, command prompt didnt want to work.. nothing. ...they decided to format the HD completely with no prompting or anything.... I lost about 20GB of (legal) videos and music that day... ;)
i rebooted the machine... same thing...
i decided to try to read the files with a linux boot disk.. no such luck... something about it being a new version of ntfs or something... so i tried the recovery disks...
moral of the story: DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES INSTALL A MS BETA PRODUCT ON A LIVE MACHINE!
p r m t h s
I used windows ME for a little while. Kept 4 backups. Amount of time for all 4 backups to fail: 10 days. Interestingly 3 of those 4 wernt caused by windows itself. (1 hard drive failure, 1 caused by Norton system works, 1 caused by my college's "protection and update" disk, and the final one the OS just corrupted to the point of not being usable. However No actual data was lost ofther than some of the Operation system files, wich I replaced with windows 98SE and XP. (Used Linux to recover all files from the drives, wich I also had on that computer)
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
There is story that circulates amongst astronomers that an irate astronomer once emptied their pistol into the main mirror of the telescope at McDonald Observatory in Texas. (Bear in mind that this mirror would have been polished to an accuracy of about 1/20,000 of a millimeter.) Supposedly the mirror did not crack, so they just painted the damaged areas black and still use it.
(I never observed there, so I can't personally verify this story. I only found one reference on the web.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
From the article:
I have lost all my files last
month. I was upgrading my
computer hard disk. I forgot to
back up my data. All my files
gone. What a shame, although
I have a Masters degree in
computer science, I ignored
the most basic step to safe
guide your data.
Michael Chan, Malaysia
Yes, Alex. I'll take "People you should NEVER hire" for $200.
don't put your laptop on or near your amp. trust me.
My most catastrophic data loss so far occured 3 weeks ago. I plugged a new drive into a hot swap raid chassis. It would have been good if it had been the chassis with no data. Instead, I plugged it into the one with our accounting data, and the SCSI BIOS flipped out and lost all my data. PHBs, protect your data. Sysadmins, protect yourselfs. Advocate the distribution of free coffee within your office... before it's too late.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
A rubber mallet used on a hard drive just before the end of the warranty period.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
From the article: I managed to lose 20GB of data that was on a hard drive I had in my rucksack was taking it to friends house to copy the data. I was also driving a rather powerful motorbike in dreadful conditions, I rolled on the power hit, the back wheel spun out on a tram track and bang I went down right on my rucksack.
Wha? Translator?!?
If you want to read a great story about how a web developer's laptop was lost (no data lost, as he keeps full backups at all times) and then found, read this first thread: Out Of The Frying Pan, Into The Fire
followed by the second thread: Un Fookin Believeable. Laptop Found.
The guy that finds his laptop e-mails him and tells him this great story.
The story is worth a read, check it out!
Synergy is your friend
I'm taking a class from a really tough professor. 10% of the grade was based on the midterm, 90% on the final term paper. The term paper was due on the last day of class of the spring quarter. This was back in the days of 8088's. I had an awesome term paper written up in WordStar. Carefully researched, yada, yada, yada. I print it up the night before, pick it up in the morning, check to make sure it's my paper and not my roommates, and hand it in to the prof. Summer vacation! Yahoo!
Sometime around July my grades arrive in the mail. I got an F. Aaaargh. It was the first F I had ever received in my life. Around August the term paper is mailed back (nice of the prof), and I promptly threw it across the room. It landed on the wall and slid down behind my bed. Otherwise I might have ripped it to shreds and you, the ever patient reader, would never hear the punch line.
Cleaning up my room around November, I found the paper. I had gotten over most of my anguish at failing grade. I was currently taking this same class all over again, just to expunge that black mark from my record. So I started reading the prof's comments to see what I had done horribly wrong, so I wouldn't get another emotionally scarring grade.
First page looked good. Second page looked good. No wait! I didn't write that stuff! The entire rest of the paper was from other documents on the system, plus some random gibberish. WTF!
Lesson learned. Always proofread the entire paper in hardcopy before submitting it. Perhaps the professor might have realized what happened and contacted me before assigning me an F. Or maybe he assumed I was trying to fool him, that he wouldn't actually read the whole paper. In any case, an agonizing failing grade that still leaves a scar upon my soul.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
"50 ways to loose your data" wasn't that a song sung by Simon and Garfunkel?
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
Quoth the article: Experts say the technical breakdown of computers is still the main cause of data loss
I don't know who these "experts" are, but I respectfully disagree. I assert that the primary cause of data loss is users deleting the data, then realising later that they needed it.
I have several Travan "write only" tape drives. Not only can they not read tapes written by other drives, they have a difficult time reading their own tapes.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
"I'm not worried about RIAA or anybody else raiding me, I've set up a batch script which automatically formats all my hard drives"
errr, this leet haxor is going to be in for a rude surprise when all his files are miraculously rebuilt...
/* TBD */
That's just plain silly and thoughtless.
She should have had her mother AND her father AND her brother remind her to save work. Everyone knows that multiple redundant backups are a way to go.
On a second thought, however, if you have only a mother constantly reminding you to do something it's already redundant and you are only utlizing minimum resources.... BRILLIANT!
How about playing frisbee with your HD platters. Thats a great way to rm -rf (as a figure of speech) your data!
-Seriv
"I went over to Mrs X's house to help fix a virus. Well one thing led to another and the bedroom. We had the laptop going (recording USB cam) when Mr X walked in...."
In the old pre-Carley [btw: don't correct me and tell me it's actually Carly or Karley or something. I don't care] HP days they had a publication called "HP Journal". Each issue had an article on how a piece of HP kit had survived a serious mechanical incident (car crash, fire etc...). My favourite was the one where this guy took a spectrum analyzer out of the trunk while he (un)loaded something else. He forgot yo put it back and reversed over it. The case got damanged but it worked fine and was only fixed when sent in for recalibration a year or so later.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Over the past couple of years, I have had three hard drives go bad in Mac laptops running OS X. Prior to OS X, I hadn't had any problems with drives going bad.
In each of these cases, the problem turned out to be a hardware problem and, no I wasn't shooting the computers out of a canon or something crazy like described in the article.
Do you think this is OS X, or could it be that today's larger hard drives are more prone to failure because they have a lot more sectors that each could go bad? (Or am I just unlucky?)
One machine (an iBook) started making a weird clicking sound. It has been sitting there all day with no one touching it and just suddenly starting making a weird sound. The hard drive never worked after that.
Another one I was developing on and it crashed such that I had to reboot the machine. (Not super uncommon when developing...) and the hard drive never worked again after that.
The third case was pretty similar. All three got replaced under warranty. Not sure what brand the HDs were. In all the cases, I tried recovery with Drive 10, which reported physical problems with the disk.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
This data is GONE!!!
http://www.singsingsing.com/has3/drivewithslug.
I take no responsibility for what I say. Even though I'm never wrong
Hi.
I was low level formatting a hard drive that I had so I could use it in another pc to install an os. A buddy of mine comes over when it's in the middle for formatting and asks "What are you doing?" I reply "I'm formatting that hard drive." and I pointed at the drive I was trying to wipe out. He looked at the drive, looked at the screen and said "You're formatting the wrong drive." Sure enough, I had the wrong drive and erased the drive with all my docs, music, movies, pics, etc. I now make it a point to only keep the drive that I am working on connected.
Another time I was playing Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 on my iBook that I had for 3 days. I wasn't using the power adapter and it shut off on it's own. I turn it back on and no matter what it won't boot! I know everything wasn't lost but damn, something was messed up.
Oh yea. I bought a game for my Mac 512k. Brought it home and went out for some reason. I come back and my mom goes up to me and says, "I treid playing your game and I put the disk in and it said Format. So I figured I had to format it to use it... so I did." Doh!
End over end just like in the article. No damage at all, no repairs needed. It feel when a strap on a case ripped, taking the zipper with it, the laptop flipping between peoples feet as it fell. It was a Toshiba... Satellite 1805.
*There's Klingons on the starboard bow, scrape em off Jim!*
Yes, I did. ;)
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
Not only that but makes regular backups.
I was working on some awesome animation (without saving) for a few hours in a school computer lab, when my friend came in to use the pc beside mine.
He pressed the power button of the wrong computer.
"Oh, I was just cleaing up, I saw all these files, but I don't use them at all, so I deleted them..."
One of the marketoids at my spouse's job was an infamous heavy drinker while out of town on business trips. One night he passed out in his hotel room after a drunken binge. A few hours later he staggered out of bed and took a piss in his opened laptop. Just to rub it in, she discreetly puts a urinal cake on his (new) laptop keyboard when he's away from his desk.
A few years back I had some severe problems with my computer; eventually turned out the L2 cache card had gone bad. Before that revelation though, I was living through random freezes but had no choice but to plod on and make frequent saves (university assignments you see).
One crash was real bad though--corrupted filesystem. Norton was able to get the system bootable again, did a quick check and nothing too obvious was broken. Breathing a sigh of relief I quickly did what I shouldn't have done--I backed up my critical files.
Problem was, I forgot to check the integrity of all critical files before copying them to my backup Zip disk! This didn't dawn on me until I opened my email program and most of my email archive, over a year's worth, was gone! By then it was too late.
Lesson learned. I always did frequent saves, work on a hard disk file then copy to floppy when done, etc. After that though, I made sure I kept two "generations" of backups now, and on different media too. None offsite though; if my house burns down dataloss will probably be the least of my concerns.
I have heard stories about people whose only way to save data in MS Office was to close the window and reply 'yes' on the popup question 'Do you want to save it?' Sometimes they lost 1-5 hours worth of changes, sometimes the whole documents.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
Circa 1992, I had two separate hard drives on my Amiga, and I backed up one to the other. I figured, it's a LOT cheaper than a tape drive, and way faster than floppies.
A hard drive fails to spin up one morning.
Ten minutes later, I wreck the second one while trying to pull the first one out of the system (I still don't know how exactly).
Lost about 5 years' worth of stuff...
Perfectly Normal Industries
The "interleaving" has nothing to do with it. While it is more complex, the major factor is that each drive you add to a stripe increases the chance one in the set will fail. Basically, take the MTBF and divide by the number of drives in the array, and that's your MTBF for the array; an array of 3 drives will fail in one third of the time of a single drive, on average. That's why you NEVER do RAID 0 for anything even remotely critical- alone it is for speed ONLY. Never do less than RAID 5 on critical data- preferably RAID 1 or 0+1.
Please help metamoderate.
My mother was so infuriated that she couldn't get something to print, she proceeded to completely rip the keyboard and mouse out of the sockets and throw them out the window."
Brian, Scotland
And that's so much more impressive than only partially ripping them out of the sockets. As far as I can tell, all she really did was forcefully unplug the keyboard and mouse (and then threw them out the window.)
But there's so much emphasis on the "completely rip... out of the sockets." And yet that specific event isn't quite as exciting as the wording leads you to believe. Hmph.
I remember back several years ago hearing about an entire automobile design that was lost by General Motors when their server died. They did regular backups and the backups worked fine. Just to be safe, they ran a verify program on the backup, then put the tape in storage. Turns out the verify program erased the backups! The whole project was cancelled when they discovered several years of data had been lost.
Funny I can't find a reference on google.
Back around 1995, a friend of mine told me his story. His father was an engineer, and had what was at the time a VERY fast computer.
My friend installed Linux on it, and decided to take it off. He decided that "rm -rf
A few minutes later, he remembered that he had his father's DOS partition mounted when he issued the command. He ran back, but it was too late. All of his father's engineering work was gone. : )
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
It was a hard day, I was dead tired and falling asleep, but had to finish some things first. My little brother was annoy^Hplaying with me too at the same time. As I sit and am about to delete a folder of junk from the terminal (linux) my little brother calls me, when I get back, I look at what I was doing and hit enter. I realised somthing was wrong when icons started disappearing from my desktop (I have nautilus show me my desktop as my home folder).
As you can probably guess I accidentally wrote:
rm -rf SomeTempFolder/ *
instead of
rm -rf SomeTempFolder/*
I still havnt regotten all the data...
It's not immediately apparent from the photo, but the drive's heads actually cut completely through the platter, leaving the rest of the drive hanging by a thread.
This drive was in an old server I covertly colocated at my high school many years ago, right before I graduated. Three weeks later, the server stopped responding. Two months later, one of my co-conspirator managed to gain access to the poor machine, which he reported as making a whole lot of noise. I opened the drive, washed out the copious quantity of platter filings, and stared in amazement at the catastrophic head crash. My conclusion is that the head crashed, for whatever reason (probably physical trauma), and spun blisfully for the next two months, grinding the platter down with every revolution.
(I never bothered to contemplate data recovery, since I didn't have any money to throw at it and the data didn't matter anyway. I'm still curious, though, exactly how much of it could have been recovered.)
When I was a lab monitor at my university many years ago, every year at the end of the semester we'd have graduate students doing comp exams. This involved 3-4 hours of intense typing on the computer, composing lengthy Word documents.
Before the comp exams one year, the professor came up to me and asked, "Do the students need to know anything special about working on the lab computers?"
"Tell them to save their work."
"Anything else?"
"No. Save early save often."
He turns and tells them they may begin. He does not, in fact, tell them to save their work. At all.
Two hours later, a graduate student comes up to me, dissolved in tears, because Word has crashed and her paper is gone. I take a look. No saved document. No temp file. I tell her, though not in so many words, that she is screwed.
The professor, who has a Ph.D. and makes about six times what I do, demands in high dudgeon that I produce the document immediately, as the student "needs it to graduate." I shrug and say sorry, if she'd saved her work, she wouldn't be having this problem.
The punch line is the exact same thing happened the next semester. After that I started going around before comps and telling the students personally to save their work, as the professor apparently still considered it of no importance. What the students themselves were thinking, I have no clue.
A close cousin to this was when we'd redo the network at the end of every semester and clean off all the computers, asking the faculty first if they had any data they needed to preserve. How many times did they confidently say "no, nothing at all" and descend on us in a blind fury the next week when they discovered Invaluable Powerpoint Presentation X was missing? I lost count.
I'm sure it's already been said.
Offtopic... I know. BUT, I can't read any of the posts unless I click on each one! This is starting to piss me off real bad. What is the deal!!!!
I had a quantum fireball 13gig 7200 hdd that just up and died on me one day. A few months later after buying another hdd and slowly getting all my old programs back I decided I would bash the old quantum against a chair before i threw it out. The shock must have done something because it worked fine for another 3 months after that!
I couldn't think of a sig.
n/t
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
At the time when you were trying to use the Travesty^h^h^hn cheap-ass tape drives to backup your critical data, had you ever ventured out onto that new-fangled thing called the Internet?
Because if you had, let me tell you, you would have seen "fucking" next to Traven more often than any other word. And you'd find it pretty quickly.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
I managed to lose about three weekends worth of jack-off material that was on 'ma 'puter in my bag while I was cartin' it off to my buddies' place so he could burn hisself a copy. I was on my Harley and it was raining like a motherfucker. But I didn't care, so I gunned it. But as I was doing that I popped a wheelie, and this damn fool did it right over the railroad tracks!
Bad idea.
BAM! My fat ass landed ON MY BAG.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
In a similar vein, get drunk and then throw-up all over the computer. Try as you might, the smell will never completely go away no matter how much you clean!
I mean really... :)
and while we're at it
s/A LIVE/ANY/
rm -rf SomeTempFolder
Notice, no chance of seperating the / or the * from the directory accidentally (both can be bad)
Works just as well as SomeTempFolder/*since the -r implictly recurses ANY directories listed.
So the * is NEVER necessary unless you're deleting files that are PART of a glob pattern.
Why do people do that? It just causes problems.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Well, Emacs has really good autosaves of files... it has saved me on more than one occasion. It also has a nice copy from the time before you ast saved, for a very limited and very primitive, yet very useful sort of version control.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Want to lose your data?
Use a HP VA7100/7400 series disk array.
17+ Revisions of firmware and they still can't fix end to end checksum errors...
kj
As someone who used to make a living from computer hardware repairs I used to see all sorts of idiocy, some of my favourites are:
* The guy who brought in a new keyboard with tire marks on it saying it had 'just stopped working'.
* The guy who brought in a laptop for 'warranty' repairs, it turned out that he had cut the transformer from the power cable and installed an ordinary plug on the end of the cable, plugged it into the laptop and ran 240v straight into it - his reason, the transformer 'plug' was too bulky and annoying.
* The guy who ran over his daughter's laptop, and brought it in for repairs, again not understanding this wasn't a warranty repair. The laptop was vaguely "U" shaped. I recovered all the data from the HDA.
* Three girls who brought in their laptops, they had been working on a project together and spilt a tub of glitter (plastic coated metal particles) into all three laptops.
* A insurnace company asked for an assesment for a desktop system which had been sprayed with a chemical fire extinguisher.
* A user who brought in a computer to complain the floppy drive didn't work - they had cut all their old 5.25" disks to fit in their new 3.5" drive.
* Another woman who complained we kept selling her faulty disks - she was saving to the 5.25 disk, then putting it in her old typewriter and typing the label directly onto the disk.
* The guy who brought a machine in for a RAM upgrade - and handed me a handful of loose, unshielded RAM had had in his jeans pocket.
* The guy whose computer was SOOOO slow because he had Virtual Memory set to 500Mb (the size of his entire hard drive) and a RAM disk set up of the same size, with everything set to load into the RAM disk. I was astonished it would even boot (eventually).
These were all real 'faults' that were brought to me for repairs.
cheers
Sara
Accidently re-partitioning a 500gb SAN volume with the centralized corporate email system on it instead of the local hard drive in server attached to said SAN.
There's no doubt in my mind that I've lost far more data to the non-judicious use of wildcards than to any other culprit.
\rm * Wait a minute, WHAT directory am I in?
I'm sure many of you have shared the experience.
I can tell you the meaning of life,
but you have to promise not to laugh.
I'm quite paranoid about data loss. I have a version-control server running 650 miles from where I go to school, where I backup all my documents and code. This buys me safety from hardware failure, and personal stupidity.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
...buying a IBM Deskstar GXP75 harddrive. Otherwise know as the 'deathstar'. I mean really, how much more stupid can you get?
(Hearing a tone of bitterness? No no.)
Why did you bring me this pile of dust?
It's my laptop. It got blown up.
Blown up?
Well, first someone put it in the microwave.
Well, I could see that making it smoke a bit, and possibly cracking the screen...
Then there were the lasers. That vaporized a chunk. And the elephants.
The elephants?
Don't get me started on the elephants. They were almost as bad as the marching band that walked over it. Of course, I could have fixed it at that point, but then someone installed Windows XP on it without the latest security patches and left it connected to the net without a firewall for four hours.
And that made it crumble to dust?
Yes.
I see.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Is to spell it loose and have a herd of spelling nazis beat you about the head until you start loosing data yourself.
Now, she's called "Clippy" ;-). ;-))
Notice it's harder to disable your mother in law than to disable Clippy.
I was wondering if she could also disguise as a dog (my wife had rather been using the dog than Clippy
That's less than $1 per "portable" GB. Not bad at all.
I bought two...
It was
del *.*
On the root directory. They never found out it was me...
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
'It looks like you're trying to write a letter. How come you don't write to me any more? Be a mensch and call your mother.'
Me: I promise I won't come in your mouth.... again.
Poster's sister: Oh... OK..
(My thoughts) like I did the last 50 times.
Poster's sister: slurp, slurp
Who will guard the guards?
No. Your hard drive is very much open to the elements. There is a little air intake with a filter in it, which is used to equalise the internal pressure. Putting it in a dishwasher would certainly get water onto the platters.
Where the default auto-archive simply deletes items older than six months, and they you're the unlucky IT Monkey who has to explain to the user why their data is missing. Oh, and you just have to love the default location for the .pst file being your _profile_ ! Genius! And then when your profile quota is maxed out and it gets fubared... But, I must stop, am getting a little carried away and have not even started the morning caffination ritual.
--
Click of Death, need I say more?
Being fanatical about backups is useless if you don't occasional do a trial restore of some random files. I have little sympathy for people who don't (only because I've been there myself, and I was an idiot for being there).
Yes, I know the backup software said everything was fine. Why trust it?
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I just though you'd like to know.
Tom.
Oh arse
Actually, I thought about buying a Panasonic Toughbook for some time, but couldn't find much info how well Linux runs on them. (Apparently they don't sell retail, but I've seen some on ebay.) Looks like they would survive such an incident w/o problems ...
# mke2fs /dev/hda2 ...
Hoooooo! Wrong Device
^C^C^C^C
It is 2AM after a week of 3/4-hour sleep nights. "The crunch". The demo version must be ready in 48 hours to show the investors, or the company is tanked. You know, the good old days...
We were so zonked we were pair programing, to keep each other from making dumb mistakes. This was before XP was a gleam in Beck's eyes - around 85. But we were that desperate....
At any rate, I'm in this directory with a zillion files we don't need. And one file we *really* need. Just finished a few hours of very delicate work on. Crown jewels sort of thing.
You guessed it... I type "rm *".
It took me a milisecond to understand what I've just done. Simultaneously the girl next to me (yes, we actually had some female programmers back then, imagine) shrieks "Noooooooo!".
I hit Control-C faster than a blink. And then, with trembling fingers, "ls".
And there it was. One file, out of the multitude that were in this directory. Our crown jewels.
I turn around and tell here "What? We only needed this one anyway!"
The look on her face was worth my heart stopping a second before.
BTW, we did beat the deadline, presented a demo, got the money, and then spent a month recovering the code from the results of this one-week massacre. I was a green rookie at the time, and this has taught me the value of "40 hours weeks" in a way you never forget.
And that every once in a while, Lady Luck _does_ smile on you...
I'm sorry, but someone had to say it.
You just know that if that disk HAD been redundant, Murphy's law would have caused a failure on the other disk at the exact moment you pulled the plug.
Fix: If it ain't broke, don't back it up!
/dev/null, wiping out an entire raid array.
I backed up
I guess they had to limit their list to stupid human mistakes to keep the list from looking like this:
10) New MicroSoft virus deletes files
9) Outlook crashed, taking your open Word document with it
8) You click on OK, not realizing that it was asking you if you didn't want to not delete your files instead of asking you if you DID want to NOT delete your files
7) Some message popped up out of nowhere telling you that your computer was slow and that you could "click here" to make it faster. You did, and now everything is gone
6) Some message popped up out of nowhere telling you that a new update was available for Windows. You clicked to install it, and now everything is gone
5) You tried to right click on that damn paperclip to get rid of it, and Windows registered a click on the Erase Clipboard button hiding behind it
4) Your hard drive crashes after a year, and when you try to restore your Windows backups, you learn the hard way that the file format of the backup file is not the same as the format the restore side of the Windows App is looking for
3) "Thank you for purchasing your new Dell computer. Your Norton Symantec trial period is expired. Enter your credit card number to purchase a license or click 'Cancel' to erase your hard drive"
2) You get a windows "error box" telling you that your computer is broadcasting an IP address, whatever that is. This is apparently a bad thing so you click on the button to fix it. Suddenly, everything is gone.
1) "Explorer has performed an illegal operation and needs to be shut down. Click 'OK' to shut down your computer" (with everything you were working on still open and unsaved)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I had a habit of leaving my computer on for hours and not saving (luxury of having an Acorn computer was that it would never crash). This was fine until I spent hours writing a thesis, and popped down to the corner shop for more Coke. When I got back my computer was off losing me hours of work. My house-mate had seen my bouncing-lines screensaver and helpfully turned off the computer with the "game I'd stopped playing". Cue gnashing of teeth.
At my current company there have been a number of thefts in the office next door. My current back-up attitude is don't assume your machine will be there the next day!
Phillip.
PS Can people please stop saying 'loosing' instead of 'losing'
Property for sale in Nice, France
are in danger if you run an install routine for a Monopoly Supplied operating system. Magically, the partition table is fouled so that 'undesirable' partitions no longer boot.
I'd like to take this moment to hoist a giant middle finger towards the Pacific Northwest and tell somebody that they are #1.
Linux installers tend to be so much more civilized, and GRUB rocks.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I had this happen a a couple of times at work before I had facilites (they get kind of pissy here if you do things yourself) move the outlets.
In most standard cubicles with the outlets in the walls, it is _very_ easy to move the outlets, they just plug into a outlet/track thing inside the wall with a locking clip.
And this other time, I was with b0rck, and he didn't save the computer store image and I was like maaaan....maan, b0rck's gonna get me in trouble.......
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
I've put several important things on the roof and then drove off. Eventially I learned: put it on the hood, or better yet on the whindshield in front of the driver. That way when you start the car you see it and don't drive off. (you might back off, but that is slower, so it normally stays on until you want to go forward at which time you look)
Word to the wise, which will learn from my expirence. The unwise should just laugh at me and my stupidity while continuing to lose things themsevles by putting them behind the wheel or on the roof)
anata sekai o kakumei surush ga nai deshou? Anata no susumu michi wa yoi shite arimasu.
this is slashdot. you expect us to believe you have a girlfriend?
Hummm... I thought that was supposed to be, "There Must be Fifty Ways to Leave Your Data..."
Your Servant, B. Baggins
After one accidental rm -rf * I asked my sysadmin why my restore request was taking so long. He said, "Well, the good news is that we're getting a new backup system." The bad news was that thanks to me he discovered that for months we'd been backing up 3 gigs of data onto 2 gig tapes and not noticing the errors.
Enter data into your laptop for 2 years and never back it up! Then proceed to send it in to tech-support for repairs and get pissed when they either swap out the hard drive or format the original drive.
I give you Mr. Steven Thrasher.
Stupider like a fox! - H.S.
Top on my list was a woman who was giving a business presentation using a projector and a presentation laptop. When the meeting started, for whatever reason, she decided to close her own personal laptop, and use it to prop up the projector so the image would be higher on the wall I guess.
;) ) but she quite literally begged me not to report that it was her fault the laptop was toasty.
;)
If you've ever used one of those projectors, you know that they get very, very hot. Hot enough to melt a laptop in fact. Many executives in this meeting making lots more money than I do and not a single one of them had the thought to say, "Hey, do you smell something burning?"
Well the woman comes to my office and gives me her laptop. She's almost in tears, despite the fact that all of her important documents were fine (sneaky sysadmins forcing redirection of mydocuments folder to a safe place
She should have offered me beer.
1. encrypt harddrive
2. fail to recall passphrase
Seems stupid, but happened to me. After using it on a daily basis for 2 years, it suddenly was "gone". Even writing a syllable based brute-force cracker didn't help, so after a week I gave up and reformatted.
...but for some reason my mother felt it was ok to delete every file on her computer with "system" in the name to free up some extra space.
Every once in a while I feel the need to remind her, but usually that comes back to bite me around Christmas & my birthday.
Children in the backseats don't cause accidents. Accidents in the back seats cause children.
I was writing a paper, on the PC, and it was like beep beep beep beep. And then, like half my paper was gone. And I was like huh? It devoured my paper. It was a really good paper, and then I had to write it again, and I had to do it fast, and it wasn't as good. It's kind of... a bummer.
One of my sister-in-laws apparently repeatedly lost data while writing university assignments by kicking the plug to her desktop out of its socket. It was never really clear to me why she didn't avoid (much) of that problem by using frequent automatic backup, but she didn't. Instead she had her mother pop in at regular intervals to remind her to save manually. This has to be the lamest story I've read in a while...
[[ the only 15 letter word that is spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable: it may soon be, however. ]]
Back in the early '90s, I worked doing telephone tech support for a well-known desktop publishing software publisher. One day I got a call from a guy who wasn't on deadline, but he was getting close. He's been working on the same document (layout) for a month, and kicked out the power cord during a save. He'd tried to re-open the file, but was getting garbage.
"You do have a backup...right?"
Of course not. One could almost hear his shoulders slump over the phone.
I bet he backs up now.
Sometimes the dust is all that's holding a computer together. Many's the time I've opened up a machine that was running perfectly for years, blown the dust out of it, closed it up and turned it back on, only to have it fail immediately. You'd think I'd learn to stop doing that.
The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must cover
Yhtill forever. (R. W. Chambers, the King in Yellow
If you're using Mozilla, use the Live HTTP Headers plugin; you can hit reload to resubmit the page, and even if the page is STILL down you now have the HTTP header, with the form contents. It's great! Like a sniffer w/o all that pesky filter config.
Copy the data at the end of the header out to a text file, and try again later. Of course all non-alphanumeric characters are encoded, but a few search/replaces will fix that.
I've used this when submitting a complicated message on a (broken) contact form... I recovered the message, and send it in an email instead.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
write a song about this?
There must be
fifty ways to lose your data...
Just slip out the disk Fisk.
No backup plan Stan
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. - HST
Well there is the story about some nerd at MIT that took apart a large multi platter disk pack and re-assembled it using transcription phonograph records for the platters. As a joke he left his bootleg pack on the shelf with the other real disk packs. The midnight computer operator 'mounted' his pack. The phonograph disks exploded from the force of spinning up and destroyed the drive they were mounted in, as well as the two disk drives next to it from the flying scrapnel!
Applying the M$ critical OS updates caused my Dad's PC to fail totally. After I updated his firewall and AV softare, I started to apply all critical OS updates. I ran the first big updates solo, and then, after that worked out OK I ran several (3 or 4) together, that Update indicated would be OK together...
Then it told me it needed to reboot. That went normally, but just as the desktop was being painted, a little black and white message box popped up that said "Explorer.exe can not load. Please reinstall Windows."
No error message, no reason, and no way around it! And of course, the machine came with the newer CDs which don't allow you to reinstall the OS on top of itself...no, it formats the HD first, and then installed the software. Took all weekend to get near where I was on Saturday morning!
So his personal and famliy biography was gone, his bridge software was gone, everything was gone!
Thanks, Bill!
BSOD. Nothing worse then having autosave ENABLED while doing a major AutoCAD layout for my transportation engineering class. BSOD during autosave which fried the HD and Floppy backup - entire final project lost, AND HAD TO BE STARTED FROM SCRATCH the night before it was due.
In a recent outbreak of confessions by users across the UK and other parts, technicians of all types took the information available on BBC's site, and beat the users with their respective keyboards...
Seriously, some people should have restraining orders not allowing them to use computers. What was that one person's comment? "Good thing I didn't put the laptop in first" (referring to setting down the laptop to put their kid in the car) - so, they're saying they would've been just as careless with their KID? Isn't that a little disturbing?
Anyway, I'm probably just one of those types of people who actually doesn't enjoy running over laptops, unlike the majority of people in that article.
There's a 68.71% chance you're right.
Instead she had her mother pop in at regular intervals to remind her to save manually.
this is by far the best way to handle this problem
No, that's bad probability maths. The MTBF isn't based solely on a constant random chance like radioactive decay, but also drive wear and tear, as well as high load increasing the chance of failure. With two or more drives in a stripe, each drive will experience less use. The chance of failure will usually be around the same as for a single drive. In some cases, the chance of failure even decreases, if high load is the main reason for failure of that particular drive type.
For a mirror, on the other hand, you increase the chance of a single drive failing just the way you specified. Of course, it's far less catastrophic when that happens.
Regards,
--
*Art
Is when somebody ruins a perfectly good machine, usually a laptop, through their own carelessness and then expects a replacement right away. I've seen this at computer stores (where they have to explain to irate customer that warantee on $2500 laptop does not cover dropping it off the desk and cracking it open, or other obvious carelessness-caused damage) and personally at work with coffee-related incidents (and yes, drinks are a *VERY* common cause of computer mishap).
The worst is that when somebody ruins a computer: a) In their mind, it's your job to fix it. If you can't then you're the problem, not the original cause of the accident (my computer is down because the computer guy hasn't/won't fix it)
b) They continue the same thing that broke the computer in the first place (precarious desk position, not backing up, liquids near the computer)
c) They don't back up. A lot of people care about their data a lot more than their computer... but do you think they ever follow the procedures for making backups and moving them offsite?
Just smash up the stack, Jack
Burn out your fan, Stan
Don't need a big ROI, Roy
Just get yourself free
Rip out the bus, Gus
You don't need to discuss much
Just forget the key, Lee
And get yourself free
Replace it with spam, Sam
etc.
From Paul Simon's song "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover"
Wow - and I thought it sucked when my little brother sleep-walked into my bedroom and pissed into my clothes drawer all over my favorite clothes. Fortunately, the computer room was downstairs at the time :)
Just in case you think he did that on purpose, you should know he had some other fun sleep-walking episodes as a kid... like when he locked himself out of the house at 3AM and woke up in his pajamas in the middle of the back yard.
...but I'm not sure if it's "offtopic" or "spam".
When I am on Windows...pressing shift + del...Sometimes I coud recover the data...
I actually torture tested a few disks for a HS project to see what would cause immediate data loss.
Several 1.44 MB 3.5" floppys were
1. Stomped on
2. Driven over
3. Wiped with a kitchen magnet
4. Left in the sun for 7 days
5. Baked at 250 for 20 minutes
6. Left at the bottom of a filthy pool overnight
7. Thrown off a roof
In all cases, the data was perfectly intact. Throwing off the roof had shattered 2 of the housings, but there was no data loss.
Ironically, when I went back to look at them several years later, they had all died of natural causes.
Those little floppys are tough, but don't count on them for long-term storage.
The ______ Agenda
It depends on how you select it... Sometimes the "top 10" are the ten most common, sometimes their the tem most interesting, sometimes their my favourite ten, sometimes their most-highly-voted...
I carefully cracked the case open and wiped off the sticky gunk with warm water. I then opened another good floppy, replaced the disk with the cleaned and dried formerly gunky disk. I said a brief prayer to the Woz and put it in the computer. Hey presto! We immediately read all of the information and made three copies for her to have.. . .
Awwwww, c'mon. We wanna know what happened next! You know . . .
You know we /.'ers never get laid. The least you could do is give us a good READ! (wth, it's only karma)
blog
with an airbag. My friend was in the passenger seat of my car, and i crashed into a guy pulling out of a driveway. Airbag split the laptop into 2. :(
my favorite of the article's posts : 'I had my Toshiba laptop on the desk with internet cable hanging. My one-year toddler pulled on the cord and crashed the laptop on the floor. The shock discharged the battery. Fortunately, no files or data lost, no damage to the computer. I was so relieved. Now I am more careful when my son is around.
.
Deepak Darshan, India/Switzerland '
cause you know, you don't want your computers to get beat up by smackin into your kids like that . .
Instead she had her mother pop in at regular intervals to remind her to save manually.
n ce Upon a Knight that makes your workes work harder and longer.
This reminds me of the Mother-In-Law unit in the game >a href="http://www.onceuponaknight.com/video.php">O
They even have a demo available here
jason
"My minidisc is broken."
"Oh? Let's see... Has this been dropped?"
[Incredulous look] "No!"
"'cause it looks like it's been dropped... See the dent here?"
[Still incredulous look] "I can't imagine how that got there!"
"Did you maybe... drop it?"
"No!"
"... or give it to someone else who dropped it?"
"No! It hasn't left my side!"
"And you're sure you didn't maybe... drop it?"
silence...
"Well, just that once..."
Sheesh.
-T
So, he does and ls and sees they all have a * after them (from the -F), and proceeds to then do 'rm **' and not realize his error until right a few seconds too late
New guy - "While you were on vacation, I re-wrote the backup scripts for you."
/Me - "What was wrong with them?"
New guy - "They took too long. Now they only take a few minutes instead of hours. Oh, and they use a lot less tape, too. Haven't needed more than 1 tape in the last 10 days."
/Me - [speechless]
yoy mean you don't clean a had drive by sticking it in the dishwasher?????
Don't listen to these people, they're just trying to mess with you.
That is exactly how you clean a hard drive.
for some reason when i turn my laptop upside down and shake it, i loose all my work.
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Jesus - how was the electric shock?
Don't whiz on the electric fence!
Here is another way. My friend ran over his new Powerbook with his SUV. Amazingly it still runs!
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
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Roughly 10 years ago, a civilian researcher doing work for the Navy took a laptop out to an aircraft carrier. It was fine until after return, when it wouldn't boot. IIRC what the repair guy said, the g-forces damaged the hard disk.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
That was one of the nice features of DEC operating systems like RSX-11 and VMS. Every time you modified a file, the new version of the file was written to a new file name, instead of overwriting the original. The file version number was part of the file name, so you might have THESIS.TXT;1, THESIS.TXT;2, THESIS.TXT;3, etc. I used to think it was a DEC conspiracy to sell more disk drives, but it did save my butt more than a few times when the current version of a file got corrupted or a change had to be backed out.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Beats pissing on the 3rd rail...
-ScottL