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 ;)"

Comments

What's wrong with freezing a drive?

[Anonymous Coward]

At least for a little bit? It's helped me recover data from other dead drives a number of times.

Re:What's wrong with freezing a drive?

[gantrep]

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.

Re:What's wrong with freezing a drive?

[Anonymous Coward]

The blurb is misleading (retrieve could mean undelete or recover from a dead hard drive). The actual story says "One user put his hard drive in a freezer, after reading on the internet that this can fix malfunctioning hardware." Of course, the source is Ontrack who would love to sell you their data recovery.

Re:What's wrong with freezing a drive?

[TheOtherChimeraTwin]

From the article: One user put his hard drive in a freezer, after reading on the internet that this can fix malfunctioning hardware

Yes, you can fix some hardware problems by cooling the electronics. Now, this would be silly if the user accidently deleted the files and then froze the drive to undelete them. Otherwise, this can be a reasonable approach, even if it sounds silly to a BBC journalist.

Going to a professional recovery service immediately without mucking about is much better, but the expense of the data needs to outweight the cost of the recovery.

Re:What's wrong with freezing a drive?

[Anonymous Coward]

it helped me too. i had a deathstar in which the spindle froze up. i froze it for exactly 5 minutes, was able to make an image of the entire drive onto a new one (not a deathstar) and now the drive won't even spin up anymore. ;-) it does work, but only use it as a last LAST resort.

Re:What's wrong with freezing a drive?

[(54)T-Dub]

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.

Re:What's wrong with freezing a drive?

[Skye16]

30 midgets, a canister of oatmeal, and dental floss.

'nuff said.

Re:What's wrong with freezing a drive?

[tomhudson]

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.

What's funny is when people back up their data, and they ask you to help them recover from their backups, and you find that they backed it up to another directory on the same disk.

Or (and this really happened to one place I went) they stored their backups on floppies on top of a 10hp electric motor. Bzzt.

Re:What's wrong with freezing a drive?

[Registered Coward v2]

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...

Re:What's wrong with freezing a drive?

[bsd4me]

In my experience, cold temperatures can cause solder joints to break. Also, I have never seen cold actually fix a problem other than proving that there is a heat-related timing problem in a deisgn.

Re:What's wrong with freezing a drive?

[spectre_240sx]

I've had the same thing happen. Actually all the work for that entire semester of school was on the drive and I almost didn't graduate because of it. (now I'm a bit more careful).

Anyway, I noticed that the deathstar would have problems at certain points and give the well known 4 scrapes and two clicks. After some hard though and a lot of research (a lot pointing to freezing) I ended up waiting till it was having trouble reading and then I twisted it with a decent amount of force. My hypothesis was that if I did this, the drive would realize that the heads were misaligned and reset them. Luckily, it did the trick and after some fsck'ng I was able to get all the data off the drive.

Dang it...

[Kenja]

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?

Freezing a hard disk

[Zog The Undeniable]

Isn't total bollocks, as we say in Britain. The Fujitsu drives that were failing a couple of years ago could sometimes be revived long enough to back them up using this method. The fault was in the drive electronics, not the physical disk.

Re:Freezing a hard disk

[sffubs]

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.

Of course, I can't tell if it would have been the same if I had just left it alone for the same amount of time, but it didn't hurt.

Re:Freezing a hard disk

[Ralph Yarro]

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.

Re:Freezing a hard disk

[ikkonoishi]

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.

Re:Freezing a hard disk

[epine]

I had three failed drives back in the heyday of Fujitsu timebombs and IBM deathstars. One we had to send off to data recovery because it failed while it was being reconnected to my backup server. This is true. It was the first time the machine had been power cycled in six months, and when restarted in the location where I had it connected to my backup server, it never spun up. Most of the data from that drive was smeered around the network in various forms and locations, but it was simpler (though somewhat expensive) just to send if off for recovery.

A friend brought me a drive that wouldn't spin up that I managed to spin up just barely long enough to recover the data by power cycling a number of times with different power supplies. The death rattle was noticably increasing as I raced to copy off the files. There was only a few gigs that mattered so I won the race by a few minutes.

The third drive really wanted to spin up. You could feel the platter quiver momentarily on each power cycle. I put it in the fridge wrapped in a thick dishtowel for about four hours. When I took it out of the fridge I had to race to get it installed in the rescue machine before it warmed up too much. It started up. Woohoo! Then it was fine as far as I could tell, but it never started again after that.

I also had a few other Fujitsu's that were rotated out of important functions before they predictably failed. And there was one deathstar drive I installed in a friends machine just before it became widespread knowledge that deathstars sucked, and that drive has never so much as burped. Just as dangerous as the Fuji bombs, a little less predictable.

We had one drive at work that failed within 30 days of being installed. Wasn't either type of notoriously crappy drive, it was just a lemon.

Since that batch in rapid succession, I haven't witnessed a drive failure in two years over some two dozen spindles. Some of those drives in firewalls were from the old less than 10GB era. They made so much spindle noise we recently decided on a mercy killing.

Here's hoping the Seagate 7200.7s are one of the good batches. I've got a lot of them now.

Freezing hard disks

[RonnyJ]

Amazingly one guy froze his hard disk in an effort to retrieve files.

I'm surprised to see this - a friend did this successfully to get his hard drive working for a while, and I've seen a fair amount of other people reporting success with it on the internet.

Anyone else?

Re:Freezing hard disks

[Saint Aardvark]

Yep, worked for me.

I had a drive die on me at work. The files on it weren't that important, and I got everything from backups anyway, but I decided to try the freezer trick so I'd know in the future if it's worth trying.

The OS was Windows; the drive was buggered enough that it'd just bluescreen when booting. I tried mounting it under a linux box, but it just gave lots of scary "can't read this sector" errors. So I wrapped it carefully in ziplock bags and put it in the freezer overnight.

Sure enough, it worked the next morning (in Linux, anyway; didn't try booting Windows to see if that'd work) for about twenty minutes -- long enough to get a bunch of files off, if this'd been an emergency. Then the errors started up again, so I popped it back in the freezer. After another half hour or so, I tried again and it still worked.

Next trick: I'm going to put some old PC133 RAM in the freezer overnight and see if it'll work in the spare DDR333 slot I've got on my motherboard. Cross your fingers...

Hard Drive in the Freezer

[vlauria]

I actually did that on a WD scsii hard drive last year. It failed on me and had important data on it. I wasn't willing to shill out a few hundred to a few grand to get it fixed, so I found a few articles commenting about how the clicking noise I was hearing was problems related to the mechanics of the drive and there was a chance I could salvage my hard drive by placing in the freezer.

I thought, "Well, the data is lost anyway, so why not?" I put it in a ziplock bag, so not to get the platters all frosty, and left it in overnight. I woke up the next morning and put it back into my computer, and wouldn't you know it, absolutly nothing except for the same clicking errors I heard the day before.

Thanks Internet, you've once again provided me with more information that I really needed.

Re:Hard Drive in the Freezer

[wirelessbuzzers]

If the drive was stictioned, depending on the lubricant, a decent way to rescue it might be

1) Heat the drive above room temperature. I'm not saying boil it; I put one of those chemical hand-warmers on mine and left it in a box for a while. This should heat it to around 40C.

2) Connect it to your computer, but leave the drive itself out on a desk. May require some monkeying with your case to let it run while open.

3) Turn the computer on. If the drive still clicks when it tries to spin up, tap it on the corner (in a way that would spin the drive if you hit it harder). The idea is to provide some torque to break the static friction of the lubricant and get it spun up.

I rescued (part of) a hard drive this way last year. I didn't get all the data off it, but at least I managed to retrieve /, /var and /etc. The /usr partition got read errors, possibly due to my whacking the disk.

Re:Hard Drive in the Freezer

[labratuk]

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.".

Re:Hard Drive in the Freezer

[wirelessbuzzers]

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.

Re:Hard Drive in the Freezer

[Binary Boy]

My first day on my very first tech job - back in the late 80s at a small local shop typical of the day - left me with one indelible impression. My hardware experience was limited at the time, so when they took me back to the repairs room, I made sure to ask what every single thing was, and what it was used for; I got a crash course that day. Anyhow, at some point we get to a place on the wall where there's a nice mini-sized novelty Dodgers baseball bat - solid wood - hanging there, looking well used. I thought it was a joke, and said "what, is that for the really hard cases?" and they proceeded with my training.

My boss took me over to a customer's recently brought in PC, with a big old ugly harddisk just pulled out; said the disk wouldn't spin up, but it wasn't a power or mobo issue, and you could hear the servo in the drive trying a few times before giving up. He told me it was called stiction and was generally very easily solved. He asked me to grab the bat, and give the edge of the drive a few quick raps. At this point I was sure I was being put on, and that my new job was hanging on whether I would do this; I was sure a Candid Camera crew was lurking. Anyhow, after a few reassurances, I gave it a shot; smack, smack, smack! Reinstalled the drive, plugged her in, and nearly as fast as the BIOS could beep we could hear the drive whining up, and sure enough booted and tested out fine!

There were similarly crude techniques for other problems and devices at the time, but that one always stayed with me. It was the day that devices like harddrives were completely de-mystified for me - I had always understood how they worked, but had always held them in some regard as almost mystical, non-mechanical devices. Ever since then they've just been machines to me, with failures that have real, traceable, and even fixable (if you dare) causes.

Re:Hard Drive in the Freezer

[vivian]

We used to solve this problem with a sharp wrist flick of the hard drive.
Basically you hild the drive vertically in your hand, with the edge facing you.
then do a sharp wrist rotation in the same plane as the drive platter would normally rotate. Better than subjecting all the drive to such a hard shock like youd get clubbing it.

Hey if it works.

[suso]

I've been able to get dead hard drives working again by throwing them on the concrete.

The freezer trick does work though

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The freezer trick does work though

[Cprossu]

there are two major ways freezing can help 1) by cooling the electronics package, pathways that have been messed up will conduct electricity and 2) by cooling the platters, a stuck spindle/head problem can be resolved by the contracting of the metal or mylar coated platters since that moves the heads away from the platters just enough that the hdd can spin up.

Re:The freezer trick does work though

[ScrewMaster]

In any modern hard drive the R/W head is automatically retracted to a safe area during powerdown and never contacts the platter anyway even when the drive is running (i.e. the Winchester flying head.) If the head ever does touch the platter you've just destroyed part of the platter and maybe the head as well. However, if the drive has seized up, cooling it causes the bearings and spindle shaft to contract and move away from each other to reduce friction. If it's enough that the motor can start turning again you may be able to use the drive for a while.

Crushed Laptop

[Robmonster]

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......

Re:Crushed Laptop

[carou]

Actually it doesn't say whether they had backups or not. But it makes for a better story if we assume they didn't.

Re:Crushed Laptop

[chiphart]

...when answering the phone in support years ago, I took a call from a user who wanted help replacing her hard drive. After 5-10 minutes of roundabout conversation, she finally admitted that the guys doing work in her building had dropped a cinder block through the ceiling and smashed her server.

No joke.

Backing up

[Antony-Kyre]

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.

Freezing Hard Drives

[bigtallmofo]

Every computer repair shop knows about this trick. Generally it's not done in a freezer, however, it's done with circuit cooler. This only works (obviously) if it's a problem with the circuit board and that the heads haven't in fact crashed or have some other mechanical problem. This works because it causes connections to expand and work for the temporary period that they're cold. You can also remove the circuit board from a working hard drive and swap it with the non-working hard drive for a permanent effect. If you have a head crash or other mechanical problem, generally you need the services of a clean room to retrieve the data.

Project E.U.N.U.C.H.

[darth_silliarse]

The funniest computer freezing experiment I have seen is this one. Still makes me giggle looking at the site....

Re:Project E.U.N.U.C.H.

[dcam]

What about this?.

Re:Project E.U.N.U.C.H.

[dargaud]

Yup, good, but I got them beat for the temperature part, and I was in the freezer myself...

Lost my financials

[xant]

I once lost a year's worth of gnucash xml data, including all the backups (and gnucash makes plenty--a new one every time you use it!). I promptly used dd /dev/hda1|grep to search for markers that I knew would be in a gnucash file, and with a little shell scripting found the original and every single backup file in deleted space. After determining with a little more fancier grepping which blocks represented my most recently updated file, I recovered that, trimmed off a bit of the filesystem cruft around the edges, and had my file back.

Then I promptly set up a system to encrypt and email myself the most recent file, every day. :-)

(Yes, I'm aware that there are programs that will do the same thing for me.)

Re:Lost my financials

[xant]

I don't still have the shell script any more, and like I said, I'll bet you can easily find some software to do exactly the same for you. But here's the gist:

What I basically did was create a brand new gnucash file, then look at the first XML element. Then I wrote a shell script that looped through every single block on the drive looking for that string using dd|grep, just as I said in my earlier post. When the string was found, this first shell script printed the block number.

Now, armed with a list of likely blocks, I piped the list through another script that looked for the date I had last updated the file, again by looking at the XML in the dummy gnucash file for an example. That narrowed it down to two (the original and its backup), so I just used dd to grab that block + 200 blocks (or however many it worked out to, I don't remember after 2 years :) and save it as a file.

I probably used vim to do the cleanup; it's pretty trivial at that point, you just look for the start and end of an XML file.

Hope that helps.

BBC Formula Articles

[djdavetrouble]

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......

obligatory linus quote

[Melex]

"Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it."

Just sounds wrong...

[neilmoore67]

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?

Re:Just sounds wrong...

[div_B]

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?

No, but I can state the obvious:

People are a lot more likely to go around telling about their hardware failing, than to tell about their own screw ups.

Resurrection? What about reincarnation?

[AndroidCat]

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?

Re:Resurrection? What about reincarnation?

[logic hack]

With Norton Ghost of couse!

Re:Resurrection? What about reincarnation?

[AndroidCat]

Does it stop people from emailing it with Occultlook Express?

the complete top ten:

[canavan]

The Kroll Ontrack top ten global league table

1. An American user became so frustrated with his laptop, he shot it with a gun, before realising there was important data saved on the computer.
2. A man threw his computer out of the window in an attempt to destroy evidence when he found out the police were coming to seize his PC and arrest him.
3. One man's laptop dropped out of his bag while he was riding his moped. The computer was then run over by a lorry before he even noticed he had lost it and needed access to the data.
4. A financial director dropped his laptop in the bath while finishing the company accounts.
5. Burglars disposed of expensive stolen computer equipment by throwing it in a river after police offered a reward for its return. Three weeks later, it was recovered and the data was retrieved from the water-logged hard drives.
6. A business woman spilt red wine over her laptop when she was showing a business partner some information after dinner.
7. One company's server had been running 24 hours a day, seven days a week for years. The company had never bothered to carry out any maintenance on it, so the server had gathered so much dust and dirt over the years it malfunctioned.
8. In an episode of computer rage, a user threw his computer against the wall.
9. A jet-setting business woman spilt café latte all over her laptop while working in an airport lounge.
10. A new car owner left her laptop on top of her car, then drove off.

Re:100 ways to revive your HD

[AndroidCat]

What about the methods that involved a chicken at midnight?

Re:yowsers!

[AndyCater]

A good colleague - Hi Ryan :) - who builds computers in his spare time 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 :) Not just women - it happens to all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons :)

Not quite creative...

[FrostedWheat]

I had two IBM death-stars and a Maxtor fail on me last year. The IBM's made that horrible clicky sound they are famous for, and the Maxtor just stopped spinning. I discovered by accident with the first IBM that if I turned it upside down and powered up the machine, I was able to access my data! It worked for the replacement IBM drive a few months later after it failed (bleh), and a Maxtor that had stopped spinning completly.

Doesn't work all the time, but worth a try. Anyone have any idea why it works at all?

Re:Not quite creative...

[Cprossu]

hmmm havent had luck with upside down drives, but i have had luck with sideways ones... before i try the freezer trick i find that once in a while turning a drive on it's side seems to work... ive recovered data from a 425mb wd and a 1gb maxtor that way....the only thing I can think of that would cause it to work in a wacky position would be wear on the bearings of either the head mechanism or the spindle. Back in the day i remember heated arguments on exactly how a hdd should be mounted, some said horizontal, the circuitry facing the bottom, some others said that hanging it updide down would put less force on the heads (?) and still others hung em sideways. The reason to hang em sideways was that most desktop style cases had areas to mount hdd's next to the floppy drive...anyone else remember the arguments, their reasons, or have any links?

Re:Not quite creative...

[prog-guru]

Doesn't work all the time, but worth a try. Anyone have any idea why it works at all?

The bearing gets worn on one side, flipping it over puts the wear on the other side. This was also worked for me several times.

Ringing out from the neighborhood...

[Tablizer]

"Oh God! I've killed alllll my poor porn! It's all gone. Every last one. Oh the mercy! Oooooooo...."

Slightly dissapointing

[Sivar]

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.

Re:Slightly dissapointing

[Mac Degger]

Ain't that the truth: I just put back in my SB Live and am selling my brand new audigy 2 zs. The zs sounds nice enough, but it just won't wake up after standby. And that's pretty important seeing as I use my computer as an alarm clock.
And you should check out the Creative forums for a brilliant example of how a company acts when they're product is buggy as hell.

Re:yowsers!

[RonnyJ]

Man, I don't know what's worse... women drivers or women computer users!

One thing of interest is that the article specifically highlighted the female user - whereas, for men, it was just a user.

The gender of the user in the list was already specified by the 'his/her', so I have no idea why they needed to specifically point out when the user was female.

Re:100 ways to revive your HD

[Anonymous Coward]

What you do with chickens at midnight is your own business.

Why you stick a hard drive in the freezer....

[Kymermosst]

Sheesh I feel old, all you kids here on Slashdot don't even know about stiction.

This really isn't a problem on modern drives, but in the past it would happen. Something that would work to unstick the drive head was to stick the drive into the freezer. This would (presumably by a slight contraction of the platters) allow the drive to spin up. Once the drive was warmed up and spinning, you could then proceed to back up as much of the data as possible before the drive failed.

Now, it's highly unlikely that the person mentioned in the FA had a drive that was suffering from stiction. Modern drives rarely have this problem.

More info here. (Warning: PDF)

Re:Real men

[AvitarX]

How much of the 150 GB is needed to backup.

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 /home (lots of long videos I don't need to backup, some knoppix ISOs that are old) is around 8 or 9 GB.

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.

Re:yowsers!

[mikael]

...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.

Freezing can help

[imsabbel]

for example the thermal shrinking can free heads sticking to the discs (the IBM problem). Or cold solder connections can work again.
Its no repair, but a good trick to try to get the drive running for a hour or two to backup everything.

Re:Freezing can help

[StikyPad]

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.

Okay, user's fault?

[SharpFang]

I've attached my Amiga harddrive to a PC at work. For a few days I've been succesfully using my home system by mounting the drive under linux as AFFS and then using the mounted directories as volumes under UAE, emulating Amiga just like the one I had at home. Then I got that idea of looking how does Windows see it.
I booted NT, Disk Manager and it displayed a requester with something along this lines:
"The drive contains invalid/corrupt signature and can't be read. Windows is about to write a correct signature. This is an absolutely safe operation and won't change the way of accessing the disk by other operating systems in any way. Do you wish to proceed?".
So, I clicked yes.
Result: 6 hours of recovering of erased Amiga partition table. Absolutely safe my ass, fucking Microsoft liars.

Re: Okay, user's fault?

[Omniscient Ferret]

When an attempt to reinstall Windows overwrote a Linux partition, I made a script to compare the fsck-recovered files & directories to a Tripwire database.

Nothing irreplaceable was lost, & only a few files - 5% or so? - lost information.

Re:Okay, user's fault?

[sparkz]

Try letting Windows loose on a SAN - it'll write its crap to the start of every device it finds!

Check WWNs (World-Wide Names/Numbers) of your Windows HBAs before connecting to your SANs, people!

Dropping does work.

[caluml]

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.

Real men (and women) use rsync

[bigberk]

After trying many, many techniques over the years (since the DOS v3 days) I have run across the best way to do automated data backups.

Just use rsync to duplicate your local volume to another local, but independent hard disk. Easy enough to do on *NIX with cron, and on Windows use the rsync in cygwin on a scheduled task. Hard disks are cheap these days, and this method gives you a fully local time delayed duplicate (so you can recover deleted files).

Advantages to this method:

• The rsync protocol makes sure that only changed data is transferred, so the entire process is quite fast.
• Backed up files are on a normal volume, no compression/packaging, easy to access
• The backed up volume can be periodically zipped up to form a permanent back-archive
• NO media to swap around

Story from PC/XT days

[Dorsai65]

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!

Must ... resist ... obvious ... joke!

[magefile]

# 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.

Re:Backup

[NuclearDog]

Every week or so at some time around 4AM, I drop into single user (I run FreeBSD at secure level 2, raw device access is disabled in multi-user) and run:

dd if=/dev/ad0 of=/dev/ad1

That way, if either drive fails the most work I have to do is shut down, change the jumpers on the slave HD to make it master, and start back up.

I do this, because not only do I have my porn stash to protect, but a few other people's who have it available on their websites which I host!

ND, protector of the pr0n

Google Desktop Search to the rescue

[ZeroTrace]

I found myself in a predicament a few weeks ago where I had just finished adding three pages to a term paper and went to back it up to my USB drive. Needless to say, I somehow managed to delete the file and corrupt the copy on the USB drive. As I was frantically thinking about solutions I glanced down at the taskbar clock to see how much time I had before it was due.

At this point one of my tray icons caught my attention... Google Desktop Search. I had been playing with it for a few days and remembered the caching functionality. I opened it up and did a search for the file. Magically, it appeared with a cache and the entire document, in all of it's glory.

This was proof enough for me that aside from the security concerns, desktop search tools do have distinct advantages. Especially instant backups :)

"female" user

[dvdeug]

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?

Re:"female" user

[evilviper]

as if we could assume that a user would be male, and the fact that the user was female was too important

They were probably just trying to point out the fact that stupid behavior is not limited to men, although they make up the vast majority of stories.

You'll see the same thing, any time there's a story about a group that is assumed to be one sex, or have other universal identifing features.

If this was a story about flight attendants, you'd see the same thing in reverse.

Creative Data loss

[temojen]

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...

Hmm... I need to copy this data to my USB keyfob
$mount /dev/sda
mount: device not found or not a valid filesystem
weird... it's not formatted
$mkdosfs /dev/sda
This is taking longer than I expected...
Hey... the light on my keyfob isn't on, but the hard-drive light is... (flip to annother VT)
$lsmod
...
ide-scsi
...
Oh Shit! (reach for power switch at back of computer)

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.

Re:Creative Data loss

[temojen]

It's actually not that hard, provided you know aproximately how big your partitions were, and you've not changed the virtual layout of the drive (which I did). Most hard drives come in a default virtual configuration of the number of cylenders, heads, and sectors that is not the same as the physical layout. Theoretically, you might be able to improve the accuracy of the scheduler by changing this to the physical layout.

Don't.

If you lose the partition table it will default back to the virtual layout, and your filesystems will be somewhat messed up (partition boundaries may not line up with cylender boundaries, etc). This will lead to some lost data.

Title Confusion?

[Jman314]

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. :)

my favorite mishap

[themaidtricks]

While a large office was being constructed, a steel beam fell on a laptop that contained the plans for the building.