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."

Comments

Re:Laptops.

[Artifex]

Does your company hold people accountable for paying for damage when they do things like this?

One of my former bosses had a convertible, which, according to gossip, would often be parked with the top down when he went bar hopping... his laptops and phones and pagers were often "disappearing" out of his car, or his apartment when he'd "get lucky" with guys from the bars, but I don't think he was ever held responsible for the losses.

Of course, if us engineers damaged equipment while doing actual work, we'd have to worry about our jobs, or at least our paychecks.

Rubik's Disk Drive

[Detritus]

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.

Laptop dropped onto freeway at ~80mph, survives.

[zbuffered]

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!

Re:Probabilities, not interleaving

[Jerk City Troll]

The "interleaving" has nothing to do with it.

Uh, yes, it does. If you have n drives, a given block m will be stored on the m%n disk. If you lose a disk, you lose 1/n of the data in a distributed fashion. This is to improve read and write speed as you no doubt know. It certainly means you're going to suffer a loss of data than if you simply had two drives in some vanilla configuration and you lost one. (Say, the first drive was full and the second was only partially full--all the data on the first disk will be intact.)

In my case, I am not even talking about disk failure, I am talking about stupid user failure. I screwed up my array (don't ask how--I don't remember) because I was careless and using LVM to do it. My second disk would not read as part of the array anymore. That means I lost every other block of the data I had.