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Creative Data Loss
lewiz writes "An interesting article from the BBC about the crazy things people do when they accidentally delete files. Amazingly one guy froze his hard disk in an effort to retrieve files. Real men don't make backups... but, hell, who needs to if you can resurrect them from the dead ;)"
I had a witty well worded rsponse to this article but I forgot to hit 'submit'. Could the admins please recover it for me and place it in the first post position?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I've been able to get dead hard drives working again by throwing them on the concrete.
I particularly like the story regarding a steel girder that fell upon a laptop during the construction of a building.
The laptop contained the blueprints for the building......
I have no sig yet I must scream.
I'm lucky enough to be able to back up most of my stuff by just plainly copying it from my drive to my USB drive. Then I put my USB drive away. I do this every few months. I guess the smartest thing I can do is invest in a fireproof waterproof lock box, and stick it in an attic.
The funniest computer freezing experiment I have seen is this one. Still makes me giggle looking at the site....
I've noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born - Ronald Reagan
"Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it."
One night I was up late doing a reinstall of Windows. So of course im tired, and blindly going through the setup and I accidently do a quick format of my development partition which contained projects I have been writing since the age of 13. After the installation finishes, I install MSVS and attempt to load up a project I was working on at the time-- after about 5 minutes of staring at an empty drive in shock a friend recommends a utility called "R-Studio". Luckily I was able to recover about 90% of my lost code thanks to this wonderful application. I will NEVER stay up until 3am without coffee again.
Uhhuh? Are you working for the Department of Homeland Security or just trying to hide something from the authorities?
If data can be resurrected from the dead, do I have to worry about it later reincarnating on someone else's new drive? That could be quite a security risk! How do I metaphysically protect my data?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
What about the methods that involved a chicken at midnight?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
"Oh God! I've killed alllll my poor porn! It's all gone. Every last one. Oh the mercy! Oooooooo...."
Table-ized A.I.
When I first read the headline, I thought it was reporting a major data loss incident at Creative Labs.
I thought, "Awww, that's too bad. Maybe they can use this as an opportunity to have competent software engineers rewrite their notoriously terrible drivers from scratch." Ah well, maybe next year.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
What you do with chickens at midnight is your own business.
30 midgets, a canister of oatmeal, and dental floss.
'nuff said.
Or (and this really happened to one place I went) they stored their backups on floppies on top of a 10hp electric motor. Bzzt.
Nothing, it's a real opportunity for cryogenics... just take everything someone knows and put it on a hard drive, and freeze *that*
Whatever happened to doing some research before posting? Everyone knows all you have to freeze is the heads...
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
...left a brand new 80GB hard drive on the roof nd drove off. It bounced a couple of times and got driven over. His mistake was to attempt to send it back for a warranty refund :) ...
You'll only get a refund if you wipe the tread marks off first.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Whenever a drive is considered binable due to it dying, I always drop it from about 10 cms onto my desk. Occasionally, (if it's not down to electronics), it can jolt it back into life. Then it's boot from a Gentoo Live CD, and backup everything quickly over NFS.
A little gem I heard a while ago: There are 2 kinds of people. Those that have lost data, and those that will.
Get your own free personal location tracker
One place I worked at, they had a problem where EVERY Monday morning, they'd have to recreate boot floppies for the PC/XT machines some of the secretaries were using. This went on a few weeks before one of the techs noticed something: said secretaries were 'storing' their boot floppies by affixing them to a nearby filing cabinet - with fridge magnets!
--- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...
# A business woman spilt red wine over her laptop when she was showing a business partner some information after dinner.
Suuuuuuure that's what happened.
Yup, I've put a HDD in the fridge before after it failed, and it did indeed come back up for long enough to recover the data.
Freezing uncooperative devices may work, but microwaving them is far more satisfying and serves a harsher lesson to the others. It does get expensive in microwaves though.
The real Ralph Yarro posts as Anonymous Coward. Anyone else is an impostor.
While burning a CD in an IDE CDRW on Fedora Core 1, about 15 minutes before having to go catch a ferry to an important meeting at work...
The amazing thing is that after lots work, I managed to re-construct the home partition enough to save most of my data changed since the previous backup. As I'd over-written the partition table, this involved grepping the block device for "ReIsEr34" so I could find the block a certain number of sectors in from the beginning of the partition (16, I think, but I don't remember), then useing this information to re-build the partition table.
Shouldn't the title be Creative Data Recovery as these people tried to get their data back? It's easy to come up with creative ways of data loss. For example, with a thermite reaction. :)
$ cd ImportantStuff/
... this way will take forever
$ rm *
rm: remove file `important'? y
rm: remove file `do_not_delete'? y
rm: remove file `dont_remove_you_fucking_moron'? ^C
Shit! what am I doing?
$ rm -rf *
Thats done. Now, I better finish that project I've been working on for 3 years
$ cd ImportantProject/
bash: cd: ImportantProject: No such file or directory
the issue with heating is that it will neutralize magnetic fields on metal...
You're right. If you use this procedure, be sure not to heat the drive above 760C.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Just put a cup of water in the microwave to prevent buildup of the microwave energy.
Also keep the HDD far enough away from the sides to prevent arcing to the magnetron.
While a large office was being constructed, a steel beam fell on a laptop that contained the plans for the building.