As regular Unwanted Blog readers can probably well remember (with probably something like a “Jesus, just shut up about it already”), I recently had an external hard drive crash. After some considerable expense I got all of the data on it recovered; even if I hadn’t, I still had some somewhat elderly DVD backups, so I would not have lost *everything.* But then there’s this guy:
Stolen laptop contains man’s dreams
A Calgary man is desperate to get his stolen laptop, with years of work on it, back. …
John Boldt is pleading for the return of his hard drive, which contains research and notes for the thesis he was writing for his master’s degree in history. …
Unless he gets it back, Boldt will have to abandon his dream and quit at the University of Calgary.
Wow. Back up that data, kids. Especially if the loss of it will ruin your life.
4 Responses to “And I Thought *I* Had Computer Troubles”
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All that time and money for post-secondary and he can’t afford a $100 externa hard drive for a backup, and a spindle of blank DVDs for a second layer?
Jim
Could be bigger:
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9HRU5E80.htm
The true disaster of the server failure is that one must go to or call DMV:
http://www.newsplex.com/vastatenews/headlines/101564938.html
And that the food stamp money is late:
http://www.nbc29.com/global/story.asp?s=13057769
There was a chap who wrote a dictionary (the full story is in “The Meaning of Everything”) and he’d almost finished when his wife got tired of being ignored and tossed all his notes in the fire. Apparently, she survived — he must have been much more understanding that would be I — and he just did it all again. Maybe they felt immortal in those days.
Long time back, over on sci.space.history IIRC, someone had a hard drive story from hell.
The early PC’s used some sort of removable hard drives that were something like a super floppy disk in a thing that looked like a thick CD case (I’ve seen one of these but can’t remember the specifics on it, or its proper designation). He also had put his master’s thesis on it…he then took it out of the PC and put it in his coat pocket.
Then he went over to his parent’s house, but they weren’t home.
No problem, they always left a house key in a box with a magnet on it over the top of the door…so he got the key out of the box…and then he dropped the magnetic box into his coat pocket and heard the “click” as it attached to the hard drive, erasing everything on it.
Yeah, there’s three basic questions:
1) What data do I lose if the hard drive in my computer stops working?
2) What data do I lose if my apartment catches fire, destroying everything inside it?
3) What data do I lose if my apartment catches fire, and I escape with no clothes?
Plan accordingly.