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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 ;)"
it'll help a dead drive work, if there's some problem with the controller board where maybe contraction from cold will cause some broken microscopic trace to conduct again, but it won't help you recover data you *deleted* as the guy in the blurb did.
I personally HAVE recovered files using the freezer trick... I managed to salvage the data from a dead IBM Deathstar, a "click of death" WD 20 gigger, a 60gb maxtor which refused to spin up, and a 3.5gb maxtor which wouldnt come up in bios... I find it somewhat dumb that they are dissing the freezer trick, as for dying hdd's it actually works.
They run a variation of this once a year or so, It is kind of like how magazines have the same crap over and over again on an annual basis - fitness magazines: GREAT ABS, Weekly World News: Loch Ness Monster spotted disembarking a UFO, Martha Stewart: Perfect Thanksgiving Doilies, PC World: VIDEO CARD SHOWDOWN, etc......
music lover since 1969
Although computer malfunctions remain the most common cause of file loss, data recovery experts say human behaviour still is to blame in many cases.
This "statistic" just sounds plain wrong based on my personal experience, as I've only one lost data by malfunction, but on many occasions I have accidentally deleted something.Can anyone confirm or deny that malfunction is the most common cause?
You've probably noticed that people's noses get bigger as they get older. That's because old people are huge liars.
This got modded troll, but the funny thing is that the original article does say "A female user" as if that had significance. Most of the other stories in the article just say "A user." Can I mod the article -1 Flamebait?
They also encourage people to backup their data as often as possible ... from what I've heard that works even better than freezing a broken drive. Don't be so quick to judge someone or some company dishonest.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
So why are you complaining? You yourself said "Well, the data is lost anyway, so why not?". It was worth a try, but it's not always going to work. If it did, WD would print on the side of their drives "If malfunctioning, stick in freezer.".
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
How much of the 150 GB is needed to backup.
/home (lots of long videos I don't need to backup, some knoppix ISOs that are old) is around 8 or 9 GB.
I currently am using about 120GB, but must of it is games (no need to back up) uncompressed (DVD) movies I havn't burned yet, but I can re-rent them need be. I have photos, but only a few gigs of them.
A sloppy back up of lets just do my
If I want to do my Linux games (pain in the ass to install) its another 6GB.
But for 150 dollors I can get USB2 drive and back it all up anyway.
I personally just back stuff up over the network. If the house burns down the least of my worries is going to be the data I have that was not important enough to leave a copy at work.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Actually it doesn't say whether they had backups or not. But it makes for a better story if we assume they didn't.
Anyone else notice how
A female user placed her laptop on top of her car while getting in. Forgetting about the laptop, it slid off the roof and she then reversed straight over it as she set off
mentions a female user and all the rest just mention a user, as if we could assume that a user would be male, and the fact that the user was female was too important to leave to pronouns to show?
cold solder connections can work again
Several people have quoted this, but I don't buy it. In order for that to be true, the volumetric coefficient of expansion (how much a material expands/contracts) would have to be greater or equal for the PCB than for the conductors, which I'm fairly certain is NOT the case. Metal has a fairly generous expansion coefficient, meaning it changes in volume more for a given change in temperature than most other materials. Most glass, for example, has a coefficient of around 85, while tin has a coefficient of 398. If the metal shrank more than the the material it was mounted on, cold solder joints would actually open further. Heating it up might fix that, but not chilling it.
OTOH, lower temperatures increase conductivity (lower the resistance) of a conductor, so if there was a marginally functional solder run, it *might* fix it. I doubt that's the case though, since solder runs usually either work, or they don't.
I'll grant that it might "unstick" a head by contracting the metal away from the platter though. At any rate, it definately can't hurt to try. At the very least, someday in the future when science has progressed sufficiently, we can thaw out our frozen drives and bring them back to life.
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