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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."
And then there was this 500 Internal Server Error and my wit and wisdom were lost forever to the bit bucket in the sky.
I asked BOFH for more space...
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
Beware your RAID-0 arrays. Screwing carelessly with these setups can cause you many problems, data interleaving and all that.
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This week, its 10 ways to lose your data.
Next week: 10 ways to get AOL
10 ways to play cards
Argh, typical geek humour: "No, destroy something using something increasingly bigger explosives!". Shurrup.
DecafJedi
my weblog: apropos of something
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
You must be thinking of a burn barrel. The Navy uses these to destroy classified documents in case of an enemy boarding. Throw the docs in, light the thermite, push it over the side.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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!
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
It was UNC. Check the bottom of this page:
1 -q2/0001.html
http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/novell/200
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Brute force and raw determination. Those 4-pin internal connectors are hard enough to fit even when they're mated right. You must have popped a blood vessel getting that in there...
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
I'm sure it was some really nice data.
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!
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
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
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.
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
Bah, I used to do this back in my old development job. If you're 6'7", like to slouch, and have to cram your legs under the desk, sooner or later you're going to give the powerboard a boot ( sometimes while tapping your foot along to the Doors ).
The worst bit was that the server that I kept kicking out was a SCO development box that I didn't actually work on. So I wouldn't know anything was wrong until I heard the screams of rage from the next office. In answer to the obvious question, "Why didn't you stop kicking it out?" I pose one in return - "Why was the power for a dev server coming from under some random coders desk?"
YLFIOne god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
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
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.
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!
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...
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.
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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.