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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
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
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
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...
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.