What Was Your Worst Computer Accident?

Anonymous Writer writes "I learned years ago to backup regularly and never keep a drink on the same table as a laptop. I accidentally spilled a drink onto my laptop's keyboard where it drained into the laptop's innards, ruining the motherboard, CD-ROM, and hard drive. Thousands of dollars and all my data disappeared in a flash. Considering that there are even people out there that intentionally damage hardware, I was wondering what kind of disasters Slashdot readers have experienced."

Comments

A solution to almost all liquid problems

[Rhodnius]

I'm fairly clumsy, and in my computing career, I've spilled drinks on a half-dozen keyboards and at least two motherboards. But all of them worked just fine after drying out.

The secret? Drink only water. I can do my computing without dependency on mind-altering drugs like caffeine and alcohol. And why pay for soda when water's free and doesn't expand your waistline or rot your teeth?

Re:A solution to almost all liquid problems

[HeghmoH]

And why pay for soda when water's free and doesn't expand your waistline or rot your teeth?

Because it tastes good?

Being robbed

[Ugodown]

The worst 'accident' I had was letting people know I had a kick ass computer. There is absolutely no data recovery when you computer is stolen and it's not physically there anymore.

Get Computer Insurance

[savetz]

I cannot overstate this: get computer insurance. It's cheap and will more than pay for itself if you have a hardware loss. I use Safeware.com, paying about $120 a year for $11,000 of hardware insurance - this covers loss by fire, theft, water, accidental damage, pretty much everything except earthquake and theft from an unattended vehicle. (I could have opted for a more expensive policy to cover those possibilities, too.) Just last week I dropped my digital camera, killing it. That model (Canon Powershot S30) is no longer available, so the insurance company is paying for a new model (Powershot S50) that costs more than what I originally paid for my digital camera two years ago.

Re:Get Computer Insurance

[bfields]

Most people won't get their money out of the insurance. So they're out 150 bucks. Big deal. Losing that 150 bucks didn't ruin their life.

The annual premium will of course add up over a lifetime, more so if you have several such policies.

Now if you happen to lose 10,000 dollars worth of computer equipment, that insurance will make a huge difference.

In most cases, the 10,000 loss will be worth precisely 66 and 2/3 times the 150 loss.... So the insurance is only worth it if your chances of a 10,000 loss are more than 1 in 66. (Well, actually we'd need to factor in the more likely smaller losses. But rest assured the insurance company *has* already done that.)

But you're right, we all have limited budgets, so for a sufficiently large risk it no longer becomes possible to amortize that risk in the way a large insurance company can. Weighing risks becomes more complicated as the magnitude of the risk approaches the magnitude of your savings.

If you didn't really *need* that equipment, then the hypothetical loss above probably really is only worth the $10000, and the simple cost-benefit analysis aboves says to skip the insurance.

But it could be more complicated: for example, if you lost the equipment and couldn't afford to replace it, and if your business depended on that equipment, then the actual impact of the loss would be more than the simple $1000 figure represents.

I can't afford two cars at once, so maybe I should reconsider buying a single car!

I'd certainly at least consider a smaller or less expensive car. But if the car is required, for example, to get to work, and if you can't afford to self-insure, then this is a case where insurance would make sense.

What about a house for that matter.

Sure. For a few big-ticket items (houses, medical care, in some cases cars), insurance makes sense even though you know it's likely to be a loss.

What I'm arguing is that insurance is a mistake for stuff like cameras; for all but a few professional photographers, it's just not going to make financial sense to spend so much on your camera that you couldn't afford to self-insure.

--Bruce Fields

Re:Honest

[Anonymous Coward]

Could be worse: you could have bought Windows ME

A word of advice...

[iamdrscience]

I'm sure at least a few of the posts on here are going to be about making a typo while running "rm". It is with that in mind that I offer this piece of timeless advice: with rm, always type your flags last. Period. There are plenty of good examples of why this is a good idea, but I think this one shows it the best:

While typing "rm -rf /somedir/file/" you bump enter while you hit slash (they're right next to each other, remember) resulting in "rm -rf /"

If you're in the habit of typing the flags at the end (i.e. "rm /somedir/file/ -rf") and you make the same mistake, you only end up typing "rm /" which does nothing, instead of a command that will fuck up your entire system.

Re:The Worst.

[Anonymous Coward]

tar czf /backupdir/`date +%Y%m%d`.tar.gz /home/directory
find /backupdir -name \*.tar.gz -mtime +30 -print0 | xargs -0r


will keep 30 days of full backups. Obviously, if depends on how much space you have, but an IDE disk is cheaper than recreating your work, and unless your work is video editing, your work shouldn't require much space to back up. If you want to get fancier, use incrementals to save space, keep indexes, etc, there's plenty of software out there.

But don't wait for the perfect solution! Start automated, periodic backups now! Drop whatever you are doing and just do it. Don't finish reading this slashdot story. Don't wait until you get something to eat or go to the bathroom. Your pants are less valuable than your data. Backups are not something you can afford to do whenever you get around to it, or to put off doing until you get it perfect.

Re:Worst computer accident?

[Tim Browse]

Well, I for one am amused by the fact that after the posts by all the Linux fans saying "Win98 - worst accident ever! hahahahahaaaa!" there is a post from one Linux user who mistyped a command and vaped his hard drive when he was trying to copy some data onto a floppy, and someone else who accidentally installed a boot loader and disabled an OS.

Let's just say that again: accidentally installed a boot loader.

But Win9X is the big accident, oh yes ;-)

Re:Honest

[ifwm]

Why is this funny? The question was about computer "accidents". Did you accidentally purchase 98? Did it leap into your cart and get itself bought before you realized it? Why does every story have to have some inane MS-bashing in it?

Re:Yeah that's why DOS was so great can't screw it

[mdecarle]

I don't know what you guys do to your Windows machines, honestly. I work on WinXP all day, weeks long with no crashes. The last crash I had was a faulthy update of some critical software. The PC I'm using now currently has a uptime of 17 days (I am asked to reboot now and then for automated software updates, which happen during boot-up). We make and support Windows Software, so that explains the undisputed use of this OS for our machines. In previous work-experiences, I've had uptime of 90 days on W2K, with a power failure wrecking my record-attempt ... (Construction workers cut the cable in the street - they didn't know it was there)