I remember seeing video of a fire Cyclone or something similar once that was kind of shocking.
My Niece (12) just posted this on her Facebook.
At least the kids have a sense of humor about this whole covid situation… 
3 Likes
lmao beeschurger
1 Like
Science!!
One of my first “real” jobs was a corporate in-house it support hell desk. It was the tail end of the diskette era.
This woman comes in, pretty twentysomething. Obviously distressed. Her laptop was on the fritz. I took it in, checked it out and concluded one of the hard disc heads had crashed. Horrible screeching noise.
That stuff is gone ma’am. Her eyes went wide. But… but… my thesis, I was writing it on that computer!
Did you back it up perhaps, as we keep telling you lot to do with important data such as say, nearly done theses? Her eyes brightened. Yes! And she dug out a diskette and ran off happily with it.
A couple minutes later a blood curdling wail from down the hallway. Read error, retry, ignore, fail?
I tried every trick I knew, blowing dust off it, trying a low level scanning tool on it… that thesis was gone.
I hated that job but it sure had its moments.
6 Likes
A backup is worthless without making sure the restore will work…
2 Likes
I would have paid for forensic date recovery on the HDD and the disk if my thesis was in question. No way I’d start over from scratch.
It wastes paper but if a document is extremely important I will print copies of it at various stages of completion along with backing it up.
At least I have something if everything else fails.
Wheels
2 Likes
It’s not a waste if you need it!
When I wrote my thesis I made sure that I spread copies around.
My parents and two different buddies from university each had versions of it on their PCs. That way I could be sure that even if my apartment burned down with my PC and my laptop and my external backup drive I would still have at least one copy (including material) around that was at most a few days old.
1 Like
I wrote it in LaTeX and used git in conjunction with a bitbucket repository. I had that repo checked out on 2 separate machines as well so even if bitbucket had screwed up and lost the data at the same time as one of my machines dying, i could still have at least recovered the version tree up to the last commit i had checked out on the remaining machine. Having a thesis stored on just one device is insanity.
2 Likes