Tell us your worst data disaster and win Memina's 2GB Pocket Rocket USB flash drive
posted Feb 24th 2005 1:58PM
Not sure how this happened, but it's been a couple of months since we've last had a contest. We're going to make
that up to you today. We've successfully harrassed Memina into offering up one of their new
2GB Pocket Rocket USB flash drives (you know, the ones
with the gold connectors and the super fast read/write speeds?) to give away.
Here's the drill: Regale us with your most horrific, debilitating tale of data disaster. You know, like the time your
PC crashed and you ended up losing your senior thesis because you were so hepped up on Vivarin that you completely
blanked out on hitting save? (We swear that never happened to us. We were on Provigil.) Whoever manages to evoke the
most pathos in us wins the Pocket Rocket (and this has to be a work of non-fiction, you dig?). You've got
until noon EST on Sunday.
P.S. - This contest is open to everybody, not just residents of the United States. We promised we'd have a contest
that anyone could win, didn't we?
UPDATE: Contest officially closed! Give us a few days to read all of these over and we'll announce a winner in a few days.
ahh, half a year ago. i had 100 gb's worth of music, 20 gb's of files hosted for friends (they were sure pissed off), addressbook contacts, and an essay i've been working on for a couple months. all gone! the hard drive simply died out on me. ever since then, i've never used hitachi products since.
Well It was the worst personal story. I worked on an archive of my mothers genology work for the LDS church. They do some ancestor blessing thing. And apperently you have to get an appointment with Bishop for this and it is a big deal in the church. Well I had it all stored on my hard drive. It comes down to a week before I needed to print it all out scanned pics and ellis island records. Plus almost 100 pages of text and graphs.
Then my Pc started to act really strange the blue screen of death and all. I had no access to anything then it turns out boom I get smashed with some virus that practically overclocks my pc and it just plain dies. I take the drive out and try to install it in another PC and well it was so corrupted it just plain wouldnt work. So long story short Mom has to rescedule the whole thing and I lost so much research that I still havent been able to replicate yet. It caused a bit of a rift in the Mormon and non Mormon factions of the family. All because I didnt back up. That was a horrid position to be in. Then to add insult to injury it turns out that this virus or worm thing was passed on by some shit embedded in a e-mail I got from a study group partner in college. cos it happend to 3 others in my group. Well there it is. Oh yeha I switched to macs mainly now.
cheers Jim
This happened this week in fact, and probably is not the worst loss of data, but it's the worst way it could happen.
I'll start by saying that when the computer reboots automatically restores an image so the files saved in there are removed.
Ok. So this person had been working on his project (a project has to be done to finish a computer science degree) for almost all day.
When he was finished and was going to save it on his USB flash drive, he couldn't find the plastic cap that covers the usb part, so he lifted the keyboard, with the back luck (and a bad keyboard & windows combination) that the power button was pressed with the screen and the computer powered off, losing all data.
Impossible to recover.
This has not happened to me but to a friend, and if i win the contest i'll give the usb drive to him (seems that hasn't got a plastic cap, fine!)
Panasonic CF-M34, Military grade notebook.
Now what happens when someone tells you that their product can be used in the rain, driven over with in a HUMMVEE and still work?
A. One would go out and buy one right? (if you don't like it, goto dell)
B. Test the unit...
Rain - Check, unit worked great...
HUMMVEE - Don't have one so I smacked it against a tree, REALLY REALLY hard (Really) the only moving part in the thing (HDDD) with a quater mil in invoicing (my last usb flash drive FUBAR) takes a huge dump.
now in defence of the unit, i have jumped on it (i weigh 210lb), thrown it at friends and even thrown of a second story balcony. but it always survived. so maybe i couls use a much need new flash drive?
Hello
My worst data disaster...its when my girlfriend
left me
Ben
Sorry about the triple post - In my defense, the confirmation email had three URL's to click, so I clicked all three...
As a parting gift from pervious employment, colleagues had given me a USB flash disk. I looked at 'silverthing' with trepidation, never thinking I would ever trust my PhD to such a lollipop stick.
I then went to a faraway country, without my own computer. In the office, I was using a computer with Windows98. Silverthing worked, and I learned to love it. Anyway, the office was closed at weekends, and PhD needed constant attention.
I have now realised how bad I am at document management. I was working directly off 'silverthing', so no copy was saved on the harddrive of office computer. But every night I would make a backup of 'silverthing' onto the office computer. I would delete every backup before making a new one. I couldn't handle too many folders, just something to do with trying to tidy my untidy mind.
After a few weeks after Silverthing had completely gained my trust (after it fell down a lift shaft and the owner of the building had to come and lift up the floor and I had to search around in pools of oil and garbage. It worked as if nothing had happened and I was convinced that it had invincible powers.).
One Friday night, I went to make a backup of my files onto the office computer. As per usual, I deleted the original backup folder before I started the transfer. But something went wrong and the computer crashed. The office was closing, they had already turned the lights off and a security guard was tapping his gun (yes gun!) on the side of my door, so I felt it best to leave. I didn't think anything of it [remember silverthing is invincible], reckoned I would make a backup on Monday morning. As I left the office, I put the paper corrections into the recycling.....
Saturday came around and I went to email the thesis to my supervisor. Went to my local internet cafe, plugged in silverthing and started up my webmail.. when I went to access the drive, it did not appear in explorer.
i took it out of the usb port. it was hot. very hot.
i tried it in another computer. no go. tech support at my workplace laughed at me and gave me some ridiculous price for even attempting to recover the data.
data gone. backup gone. deadline: three weeks.
in the end, I managed to get hold of older versions from my supervisor, so all was not lost. but there's a moral there somewhere. I still have silverthing. i use it as a voodoo thing; it keeps away demons and such like.
While a grad student in Astronomy back in 1982, I was taking a course in Astronomical Mathematical techniques. A final exam consisted of a computer simulation in orbital mechanics, which involved massive data crunching.
The Astronomy department had a PDP-11/24, which was not being used by anyone that semester. Having a desire to play with this machine, I decided to tackle the problem with the PDP.
I completed the problem over the course of the week, and was making the output look pretty when I had my incident. The workspace had a limited memory cache, which I filled. While attempting to move columns around, I got a message informing me of the problem. I saved my last version and then tried to clear the workspace. I used a unix command I was unfamilar with, to clear the space. BANGO! As the workspace was full, the current version was not saved in its entirety. I had a hard copy of the program, in a much earlier form, and had to spend the next 48 hours re-doing all my work, in order to get the project in on time.
Needless to say, I did not use this PDP again while in the department.
I was a technician for Control Data in the early 70s. A large customer of ours (insurance company) was having trouble with their Optical scanners and could not get their typed reports into the mainframe computer.
Back in those days, they optically scanned in type written text via a monstrous machine about 12 feet long, with giant input and output hoppers for the stacks of reports from the remote offices. Needless to say they were a mechanical nightmare, with large motors and rotating drums to move the paper around.
The customer asked that I come monitor one of their Scanners so they could get in some very important data from all of their remote offices. Seems the machine had been temperamental.
Well there I was at the back of the machine where the paper documents exited the scanner and were grabbed by large rotating drum to be placed below in the output hopper. Watching the paper work flow through the machine, I was zoning out, taking in the beautiful computer room , all glass on the 14th floor, no one around, no one outside in the elevator lobby on the other side of the glass wall. Just me and the hum of the scanner and the other computer room hardware.
I saw something that looked odd and I leaned into the machine. Well my boss had told me to wear a clip on tie, but those were for nerds right? Well in my tie went, grabbed by the output hopper drum. Of course my luck, the tie also covered the sensor that told the drum there was paper there to moved to the output hopper.
So there I am being pulled into the machine, I’m using all my strength to just keep my neck from being snapped that I can no way lift a hand up to turn it off, let alone reach the power off button. So there I stand bent over the machine keeping myself from being sucked in by my tie. The customer’s precious data is still being read and pushed towards me at the end of the machine. Well it was not being stacked neatly in the output hopper, it was being shredded against my tie, and building into quite a heap of waste under my face and neck.
Finally someone comes out of the elevators. They wave at me. Great! Then they see the problem and thankfully I am rescued by one of the operators.
Embarrassed, I explain to the customer that I alone lost almost two months of their remote office data. I spent the whole weekend going through the ripped and shredded documents that we were able to recover from the machine and typed them in by hand. And on top of it all I still had to repair the machine that my tie had screwed up.
As a joke, on my birthday, the It manager for the firm presented me a wooden plaque with a clip-on-tie mounted to it.
Well, call this one, "the best well layed plans laying in routines at the foot of reality".
The plan was to off load and recover all the user's data from their old PC before their computer was replaced with a new one. Then one day after all the checks and balances were in place and accounted for, the server, which was used to store the data over night, had a hard drive crash before it's daily back-up was run. You guessed it, all the users data was lost for that day.
After all the scramabliling was over one user's was totally lost. (No PC hard drive, no data, bad situation, time to CYA, how could this happen?)
The plan was immediately changed to add one more day to the process. After the change the server never had another hard drive cash, ever again!-)
My awful nightmare of data lost was long a go when i was 11 and was learning to use my fathers company pc, a nice and old amstrad whith a “huge” (at the time ;)) disk of 20 mb, 5 inches flopy disks, whith MS-DOS instaled and running a DOS based software for acounting.
Well things were prety simple and hard.... learning from try and error, exploring someting new.... the command prompt c:..... c:stkdel *.* ........ and kabommmm! All the files from the working directory were lost!!!!
My father got crazy whith me and i never forgot that line of command and the mening of *.* !!!
That was my life lesson of the need of BACKUP before any experiment!
I think everybody has one story like this in is life.
If not, learn to Backup because.... The KABOMMMM felling may Knock at your door! ;)
Hi
For me it was my work laptop dying. I work in a doctors office and we do a VNG test (done to test balance and nerves). 90% of my tests are
done at patients homes. My job is to take the test equipment, which includes a laptop and go see the patients. This is part time sort of
work and do it 2 days a week. The results have to be printer and then passed on to the office. For each result i turn it... i get $35 dollars. Well we go busy between thanksgiving and Xmas. I was working 3 days a week and doing 3-4 tests a day. Before printing, the tests have to be marked for abnormal/normal patterns. Since the office is pretty good about me taking my time... i kinda kept passing on marking
and printing the tests. I was like! lets do this in Xmas break! I will be fee from school! so can do it all in one day. Anyway! come 27
December i finally decided to pull the laptop out of my work bag! and it would not start. DEAD!!! MY GOD! Dead!! My $900 dollars worth of
Patients data! LOST. I cried!! I really did. Apparently the hard drive decided to go belly up and took all with it. I lost all the unmarked patient data, which meant i could not be payed for the results since the office could not bill the insurance providers without the printouts. To say it sucked! would be the understatement of the year.
I spent the first 3 weeks in January visiting the same patents repeating the same test. Now i try to back up all my data every work night. I have a 128Mb memory stick! but it fills fast. So this 2Gbs stick can come in handy in saving future disasters.
Thanks for lending a shoulder for me to cry on.
Back in college, one of my friends (friend at the time... I have since decieded that he is crazy and avoid any contact) asked me to look at his win98 laptop. It was running scandisk everytime it booted up and then getting an immediate blue screen. After failing to get the disk errors fixed, I explained to him that his hard drive was hosed and I asked if he had dropped it recently or anything like that. He explained to me that he had got aggrivated with the laptop a few days ago and thrown it through his bedroom window... not just out, but THROUGH. Then he proceeded to show me the broken window and told me that he figured throwing it through the window probably had caused the problem.
No USB failures...this will be my first. Used to back up everything on CD, and then lose the CD
Hey,
This was a couple of years ago, in the late 90's when most computers didn't have USB or CD. I had my final project (due 3 days before that) that I just finished around 6am after smacking the keyboard for about 15 hours on my HD (at home) and each of 5 floppies (5 because I had bad experiences before)...Anyway, none of the floppies worked and I got 0 on the project, bringing my Computers class average from 99% to 65%. Terrible
I had a long and elegant story typed in that would have made you cry and won me the USB key, but I hit refresh by mistake and lost all my data....
I'm a physician,
Saw a patient with HIV one day, thought how terrible the virus was and the similarities to a computer virus. Later that night I went home, reviewed some peer-papers on the virus, only to land myself a computer virus which fried the hardrive along with all my medical school notes. In retrospect I realized that just about everything in this life is prone to breakdown. Thankfully, most of it can be fixed.
Maybe with a good backup system I could have circumvented this disaster.
Hi
My worst disaster was when my whole music collection (30 Gigs) was lost when my computer was infected with a trojan. I had a big party planned and all the playlists ready. I had to lose many nights of sleep in an effort to try and compile a new collection. I am sure you understand how important this is.
Karan
Last week. 200 gigs of porn. 100 gb of MP3, 100 GB of DVD's. Oh, and my Outlook.pst going back to 1996. Nuff said.
this one is easy... an ex-girlfriend kicked me out of her appartment, and she did it in the "you cheated on me so let me trash your stuff" way by throwing my old powerbook out of the third floor window onto the street. I found it down the street so badly wrecked that my local Mac store couldnt get the data out of it, even when moving the drive to another laptop.
where can I place my errors 'cause some of them,my hard drive got erased,forgot to save my Whoopi Goldberg Biography,took of my hard second hardrive and when I went to place it back windows wouldnt accept it!!!
Worse then losing a single file is the dreaded loss of years worth of files. I recently got my Compaq laptop back from HP (worst merger ever). It took me 4 months but I finally convinced them to fix the screen hinge on my otherwise working (in warrenty) laptop. Of course they felt they had to stick it to me one more time and before returning the laptop to me, they formatted the harddrive taking extra effort to point this out on the packing slip included in the shipping box. Now Im faced with recreating countless documents on an as needed basis and finding installation cd's for programs long since forgotten.
well i ordered my mini and to do so i had to sell my desktop pc.Before sellking the pc i backed up my art folder with all my diffent photoshop, fireworks files, and website templates that i was working on for my portfolio on a difrent desktop's hard drive while the transfert was taking place i left the room and came back a few howrs later thinking i had backup everything i reformated the PC . 1 week after when i got my mini i saw that i lost all my stuff i tought i backed up, only a few files were there and a bunch were invalid "due to an incomplete transfert i supose" welll my luck i had a few of them on my ipod but i'll never get back all those files. so much for my portfolio guess i'll have to start over.
I dropped my USB flash watch in the toilet and lost all my college work, my work applications, and personal data. In the toilet.
My worst data disaster was getting robbed by gypsies (and I'm not even kidding about that) my senior year in college. Their M.O. was to walk, unobstrusively, into a house in the middle of the day, pick up two handfuls of stuff, and walk out. In one hand they had my laptop (my first PowerBook, darn them!), mini-Disc player, all of my mini-Discs, and my backup Zip disks (all contained in a padded tote bag). I lost 3 1/2 months work on a thesis, as well as all of my papers from college, several job applications and resumes, and a lot of fantastic music.
Of course, in the other bag they took, they got really sweaty gym clothes, so it kind of worked out, Karma-wise. :)
fuhgeddaboutit.
-first semester of law school (a top5, if i may)
--1 week before the end of the semester and finals, etc. if you've been to law school, you know how many notes, etc there are, and how impossible it is to do without them.
---laptop harddrive fails totally. no tool, no nothing can get it back.
----end of story? a phone call to drivesavers, and close to 1500$ (that i didnt have) later, i had my data back.
true, i got the data back, but this was a disaster, trust me.
My dog steped on my cousin's 5 1/4 disk wich had his word processing program (I can't recall the name), well in those times there was no emule and it was a bit dificult to get *aham*pirate*aham* copies of programs. He got prety pissed at me.
I was doing a historical research project/DVD which required the use of not one but four external hard drives (80GB ea, at the time that was huge!) in order to store scanned images, archival data, captured and converted video from old 8mm, 35mm, VHS and Beta sources, audio interviews, graphics and a very rare conversion of some turn of the century wax cylinders. Having pulled together these resources over the course of three months and creating the documentary I was ready to render the video to disc to begin the authoring process when a transformer in our neighborhood blew due to some kids down the street drag racing and causing an accident knocking down not one but two electric poles. The resulting surge blew past all safeguards I had at the time and knocked out three of my four hard drives, DOA. The final drive was damaged but the data was retrievable, luckily it was the drive I had rendered the video to, but all other content and research was wiped out in a matter of seconds. I lost three months of long hours, thousands of travel miles and some rare content never to be heard again.
BTW the project was finished using the rendered video, but we were unable to make any additional changes to the first draft.
At my last job in a research lab, we had a whole host of different instruments that we worked with. We had machines that would give us counts on what specific cells were present in blood and in what amounts, and we had software that tracked blood products that we worked on, and counts that happened at all different stages during the enrichment processes. Then we kept track of where these products were stored.
Now, lots of this lab stuff doesn't have software and it's been tracked by hand, but we wanted to improve on that. We bought Panasonic Toughbooks that would deal with the rigors of cleaning from living in a clean room environment all the time (constantly being cleaned with alcohol). We wrote Perl software that could grab the readings from the blood counter automatically, save it to a database, and it had a beautiful web front end that let you look up a sample easily, and create Excel spreadsheets automatically that used continually updated averages and readings to see how that sample compared to other samples that fit the criteria.
We had custom software that went to other databases in the facility to retrieve information other labs would enter for custom Crystal Reports that everyone could use. We had a freezer inventory database of all this than an intern got to spend 3 months entering by hand from paper (thousands and thousands of vials), and it all worked perfectly. We had everything being automated so people wouldn't make mistakes by hand, it would create an audit trail of all issues. It would keep electronic copies of everything around.
However, we never added our main server for this to the nightly backup routine (which would mean it was backed up to the network, and with offsite backups of the network). One day we go to do something, and it doesn't respond. Check on the server, dead. Boot off a floppy, try to access the drive, can't. Research on the internet, ship the drive off to Drivesavers, who promise to get data back from a hard drive sitting in a lake, or in a fire. However, the master boot sector had died on the drive and they would be able to recover nothing. Our only backups of the custom software we wrote are months and months old, missing features, and poorly commented at that point.
Needless to say, we bought a new server, RAID built in, daily network backups, and weekly CD-R/DVD-R backups. We lost all the data from the past few months, other than paper copies of charts that people had printed out. The freezer inventory was gone. We re-wrote the software in under a month since we had done it before, but it wasn't the same. Additionally, we had asked IT to add this computer to the backup every day, but they hadn't added all the directories that we had requested, so we didn't get fired. Now, I make backups of my code a lot more often, as you can understand.
My first year of law school, I was finishing my appellate brief and religiously hitting save after every word. I was in the library at 12:00am, it was due by 8:00am the next morning. I had just completed the entire first draft on my brand new ho pavillion laptop... finally, I went to save it onto a floppy so I could run to the library computer and print..I hit save as and the computer froze.. no big deal.. except it wouldn't restart... so I began to panic.. and then the floppy wouldn't come out because the metal lip around the part that slides on the disc was bent so I yanked it out and of course.. left a piece of the disc in the laptop.. which still would not start up.. there was no IT person at the law school at 12:30am and I didn't even have notes to rewrite the paper... it was ALLLL on my laptop... by 1am, I was completely frantic and had too much coffee.. I ended up throwing my laptop across the library into a stack of ALR books.. the laptop broke into two pieces (halves) connected by a ribbon cable.. and I felt sOOoo much better.. the next morning I brought the remains to my professor and she allowed me an extra day...
My pirated copies of Photoshop CS and Flash MX, as well as 20 gigs of music, all my AIM logs, all my documents, all my porn (not that much, but very very important), and everything I'd saved in the past two years were lost mid-2004 when my (brand new) 80 gig Western Digital HD crashed. And then the whole computer crashed and I lost everything on the secondary drive. And *then*, after trying to fix it myself (mistake), I had to pay a techie $300 and he didn't even reinstall the second HD. And as of right now, my FireWire card *still* does not work, because the guy was too stupid to reinstall it properly and I can't afford to have it fixed by someone responsible. Oh, and I still don't have all the data from the 80 gig HD. Talk about pisser.
Its weird that this post comes now, because just last week, I backed up all the information on 120 gig HDD on a friend's USB/Firewire Hard drive. I then formatted the drive and reinstalled windows. When i plugged in the drive to get my drivers, music, pr0n, etc., the drive would not work. I couldnt get to my ethernet driver(on the disk) to get online to troubleshoot the drive. Well, sixty dollars later (firewire card), I was still unable to get access. I was so frustrated i installed BeOS, only to find out that my floppy drive was broken so i couldnt boot. I am currently in the process of rebuilding my illegal 10,000+ song collection on my old windows 98 machine, while I wait for the delivery of a crossover cable to send the ethernet driver to the XP machine. I have zero patience left.
last week my home pc stopped working, after trying 5 different data recovery programs & 3 different pc's each one has reported raw data read failure. Every family picture we've taken over the last 3 years is now going to cost me $500 to $3000 to try & recover, along with email, docs, ... My wife says we are done with digital cameras. I have since purchased a spindle of cd-r's & will be performing regular backups.
When I was in college, the week before finals, I was working on a huge paper--months of research, 40+ pages of bibliography alone, folders of saved info, websites, notes, drafts. I am saving probably every 5 minutes. I try to save it one more time before printing it out--my computer crashes. Hard drive failure. Not only did I lose my giant paper, but I lost all my saved class notes, my webdesign work, many many gigs of mp3s (in the heyday of the 1st Napster I had gone crazy), important photographs, emails, passwords, and most importantly, my sanity, the next week's worth of sleep, and an A on the paper, because my grade got docked for lateness despite it all!! Bastard professor.
My worst disaster happened when I was working at the athens olympics in the television master control (the place that runs commercials, promos, and logos.) I had acquired a taste for Chef Boyardee while there (not much for greek food), and was ravenously devouring a bowl while hot-plugging in a new drive that contained a new ad for Visa. I set the bowl on top of the rackmount unit, and whilst plugging in this new drive in the array, i bumped the rack, and the delicious mass of ravioli in meat sauce came crashing down... right into the array. It's a good thing i was an intern... let's just say i wont be around in 2008.
-Gabriel McClelland
I work on network hardware all day and frequently bring work home. I forgot to take my work out of the drive one day an a subsequent reboot killed my system. Thats what I get for staring at computers all day long. I lost 100gb of pictures and music all because I was tired of thinking. That was a great day.
so it was my senior year of college, and it was winter break. I was planning on sticking around so I could finish up (read: start and finish) my senior project, a 75 page report on harmonic vibration and its effects. My grandmother got real sick, and I had to go home and try to get the report done while visiting my grandmother in the hospital a few times a day. Well, my parents had an old HP P3, and when I went to hook up my portable mass storage device (zip 250), somehow all 40 or so megs of my report (graphs, charts, collected data, all that engineering geek junk) got corrupted. Of course I only had that copy of all my stuff, and my group members had all gone home for Xmas break, so I had no way to get ahold of the data again. I ended up starting over, doing what I could, and handing in an incomplete project. I failed the class, and therefore had to come back for another year, just to retake that class. Turns out my grandmother didn't even remember me being there at all. It figures, doesn't it?
Simple... this is horrific simply because it was my own fault. I had gone to New York with my fiance and family for Christmas. She and I went into the city and had the best time, twin towers (at the time), pictures in the snow at the top of the Empire State Building, etc...
Come back to the family's house, going through my digital camera pics from that day... go to erase a particularly ugly photo, and manage to erase the entire memory card instead.
My first romantic vacation (ok, except the family part) with my new fiance, all digital memories erased because of user-error.
I rule!
My pregnant wife and my 4 year old son were going away on a vacation with out me. I took advantage of this and planned a LAN party with a couple guys. We never have much time to do fun stuff and I hadn't been to or hosted a party for many, many years.
We had every thing set: people were bringing hubs or routers. Then the day after my wife leaves....i go to turn on my PC and Fzzzt...the capicitors on the Mother board leak and fry the CPU and MB... Blah.
Not only was a fun party not had but I had a whole week of no free time at the PC. The parts didn't get in until later the next week.
I was writing for a newspaper at the time. I was working from home on deadline day: not the usual practice, because the editor hated when we were outside the office. He liked having everyone sitting in front of him while they worked (he was a bit of a control freak.)
I had five articles all lined up and ready to go. I wrote fast that morning, and was about two hours ahead of the noon deadline.
Then, the lights flickered before doing their best impression of Saturday Night Fever - you know, where they get reeeeally bright, then fade, then bright, then.... this went on for a while, but my panic-stricken finger had already stabbed out to the power button before the rest of me dove under the desk to yank the power bar out of the wall.
The lights went out and stayed out. Not knowing if the CPU was dead or not, I pulled every last cable out of the box and scooped it up. I quickly called the office to let them know what was up before I ran out the door, dumped the PC into my car and took off like a bat out of hell.
I screamed into the office not 20 minutes later (normal drive time: 30 minutes) and held my breath as I plugged the PC in and tried to boot up. No dice: the drive made an ominous sound sort of like popcorn popping before I dejectedly powered it down and made the trek to my editor's office.
He did his best to avoid giving me an "I told you so" look as he said deadlines are deadlines, and he didn't care if my grandma died.
With an hour and a half to spare, I sat down in front of one of the office machines and hammered out all five pieces, using whatever I could from my scribbled notes and patchy memory. I filed the last one with about 2 minutes to spare.
In the end, the hard drive was toast, fried by the power surge. I managed to keep my job.
Carmi
http://writteninc.blogspot.com
so it was my senior year of college, and it was winter break. I was planning on sticking around so I could finish up (read: start and finish) my senior project, a 75 page report on harmonic vibration and its effects. My grandmother got real sick, and I had to go home and try to get the report done while visiting my grandmother in the hospital a few times a day. Well, my parents had an old HP P3, and when I went to hook up my portable mass storage device (zip 250), somehow all 40 or so megs of my report (graphs, charts, collected data, all that engineering geek junk) got corrupted. Of course I only had that copy of all my stuff, and my group members had all gone home for Xmas break, so I had no way to get ahold of the data again. I ended up starting over, doing what I could, and handing in an incomplete project. I failed the class, and therefore had to come back for another year, just to retake that class. Turns out my grandmother didn't even remember me being there at all. It figures, doesn't it?
i used to have 2 pc desktop machines, one for serving data and one for "work". after working faithfully for me over 2 years without so much of a hitch(and no backups), the server crashed and wouldn't boot because of boot sector errors. the other disk was massively corrupted due to the large number of files open when the crash occurred. on top of that the floppy controller and ide controller died at the same time, so nothing could be done to salvage the drives aside from buying external firewire enclosures for them(no empty drive bays, free pci slots or unused ide ports) then paying $575 dollars to have the primary drive recovered. in the end i lost one disk almost completely and recovered the other half fully. to make matters worse, i had a show coming up and couldn't showcase half of what i had wanted.
had i had a usb drive, i probably could have at least booted the dead computer and recovered the drives myself, and i would have had a much better show.
i ended up buying a used dlt III drive, some tapes and a scsi controller and try to run backups as frequently as possible, but i'm still freaked at losing ide and floppy controllers again.
what a bad week to say the least!
I had an 80gb drive in my PowerMac G4 that died. It was so gone that even DriveSavers couldn't see a single byte of data on it. Apple replaced the drive with a new one. About a year later the exact same thing happened. I complained that they should replace the computer in addition to the drive because clearly something was wrong that was causing the drives to fail. They said it's amazing how often drives failed and agreed only to replace the hard drive again. Some months later that drive also died the same permanent death but I had moved to a different country and wasn't able to get that one replaced. I disconnected that drive cable, installed the OS on the second hard drive and bought an external drive. Later when I was experiencing intermittent trouble on the machine I thought to use memtest to test my memory and found a bad RAM card installed. Was that the problem all along? I have no idea, but ever since I replaced the RAM card I haven't had any major problems (but just in case I never reconnected the primary drive cable).
So three failed 80gb hard drives in the same machine, all of which (stupidely perhaps) had my document folders and mail. I am a photographer and most of my photos were not on the failed drives but each time I lost some of my photos, the last time being the worst of all when I lost several digital 'rolls' I had taken in NYC that I did not have backed up...
This has more to do with a work experience but was still harsh on my existance. We had a huge compaq array (digital) terrabytes of company production data sat on this thing the setup was installed by an employee that was no longer with the company. On one seemingly boring day one of the fiber interface cards went haywire on a prod server and killed the array along with are production billing system being responsible for the array myself I knew it was on its last legs. The array was so old that we where not under contract/warranty and the company would not cough up money to renew so we had to contact compaq and spend a bagillion dollars to have them recover the array and they where not able to recover everything. So after a weeks worth of hardly sleeping trying to get the array to come back alive we where informed that the array needed to be moved to another data center in another state along with are production environment so we slaved away for a couple weeks moving the machines and after moving everything and feeling fairly accomplished we where abruptly laid off.
Very easy...Access Data Base Jumble. Had a data base that sorted the right side w/o taking the left side data with it - DB rendered useless. Had to reconstruct DB using old coffee stained print outs, and wrinkly yellow sticky notes. One month later: data restored, hair line receeded, and tripple back up in place. Arhhhhhhhhhh
We lost 64 hours (4 people @ 8 hours) of solid research because Microsoft Word did not notify you that you couldn't save a document.
As we worked on multiple computers we use a shared drive on the server. On of our guys was compiling the data and is used to opening the file from the server instead of coping it.
Three of us worked on getting this final document put together and we diligently told him to hit save. This was going smoothly until he closed the file. No problem, we'll open it again and found out that 1) the network connection was dropped 2) the file he was working on was "being used by another process" and 3) none of the changes from today were in the file. Yet Word kept saying it encountered no problems when we hit "save".
We spent the next four hours going through all our data and recreating the file, this time using Pagemaker instead of Word.
The original guy who made the word file has since "retired" and purchased a Quizno franchise. I know this wasn't the only reason to change, but must have factored in the process.
i used to have 2 pc desktop machines, one for serving data and one for "work". after working faithfully for me over 2 years without so much of a hitch(and no backups), the server crashed and wouldn't boot because of boot sector errors. the other disk was massively corrupted due to the large number of files open when the crash occurred. on top of that the floppy controller and ide controller died at the same time, so nothing could be done to salvage the drives aside from buying external firewire enclosures for them(no empty drive bays, free pci slots or unused ide ports) then paying $575 dollars to have the primary drive recovered. in the end i lost one disk almost completely and recovered the other half fully. to make matters worse, i had a show coming up and couldn't showcase half of what i had wanted.
had i had a usb drive, i probably could have at least booted the dead computer and recovered the drives myself, and i would have had a much better show.
i ended up buying a used dlt III drive, some tapes and a scsi controller and try to run backups as frequently as possible, but i'm still freaked at losing ide and floppy controllers again.
what a bad week to say the least!
My worst data loss story happened on a lonely night.. i decided to have a little self pleasure session w/ my desktop.. i started browsing through my p0rn collection and loaded a few files that i have not seens yet (new downloads) into my media player.. things were going just fine and in the middle of playback my computer crashed.. naturally i restarted the computer resorted to human memory to sustain my state but since i've been spoiled by the internet for yrs my human memory wasn't doing a great job.. and to my luck XP got corrupt and wouldn't start. so nevermind the frustration and the thot of having to rebuild my computer from scratch i ended up pissed off and "unsatisfied" that night. my night went from lonely to PATHETIC :(
Last year the most horrible thing ever happened to a computer I was responsible for, with all of my father's data. The explanation is far too long to post here, so I'll just refer you to my original post about it in october. http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=231124#post2226071
-everyplace
Another one but isn't mine...
You know the moneyclips the guys wear, enough for a few cards and bills? A friend of mine's wife got him one for Christmas and he loved it. It looked snazzy too.
He took us out for lunch and found out his Credit Card would not work. He went to the Mac machine and found his debit card didn't work. Trying to get back into the office his personnel badge didn't work. Security hassled him even when we vouched for him.
The culprit: the moneyclip uses a magnet to stay closed. It wiped out the data on the magnetic strips, rendering the cards useless.