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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."
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.