Data loss: what are your horror stories?

Last night, my computer ruined a song I'd been working on for weeks. Thankfully, it didn't erase it -- but it changed all my levels, effects, etc. It feels like a nightmare.

This is a place where you can annotate the hell that is data loss.

About 5 years ago I lost 18 months of music I’d wrote when a hardrive failed. At least I’ve now learnt my lesson to backup as often as possible.

I was quite happy the other week though as I found rough mixes of the 5 best tracks from that period on a cassette I’d recorded.

congratulations on the semi-recovery! that does sound truly horrific.

http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/memoryalpha/en/images/2/2c/Datas_head.jpg

6,000 row Excel file got mis-sorted last week and I had to re-enter the first 4-5 columns (thankfully, it was a supplier database and the addresses were intact, I was able to use those to line up the store #s..) It's not exactly losing my whole mp3 collection or anything, but took me almost a full day to fix!

I had an acquaintance at university, who was involved in a car accident on the way back to halls for the final term and exams. His car was totalled, as was his printed and bound dissertation, his laptop, and his hard drive containing the backup of said dissertation. On top of that most of his books and study notes were destroyed. I think he had about 48 hours to rewrite his dissertation. I actually can't remember if he managed it now or not...

I guess the lesson is don't have all your backups at one physical location.

I did once make a housemate go out and buy a hard drive so he could backup his stuff. He's a poet and was making a lot of complex visual art, as well as sound poetry (again including a piece for his dissertation), on this aging piece of shit laptop and wasn't even backing up to a USB stick. I nearly had a fit when I realised.

I thought of another bad one - in my last job, a temp managed to delete the contents of an entire shared departmental network drive. Fortunately the IT department had backup servers, but we all still lost 24 hours work.

i accidentally saved over my zelda game slot with the intro screen.

omg that dissertation story makes me sick to my stomach.

Most recently, I lost about eight months of work work (which comes about to about... 2000 pages of writing) because I had been saving everything to my C drive, because for a while our network was going down once or twice a day and it made saving to the shared drive a ridiculous productivity killing nightmare. I took a calculated risk and so, of course, my hard drive shit the bed and that was the end of that. There are hard copies of everything, and the really important stuff (as in published decisions rather than just internal memos) were backed up electronically, so it wasn't as bad as it could have been. I basically had to do a lot of selective retyping and hear a lot of crap from our IT department about how I'm a dumbass for saving locally. (Note: hearing a lot of crap from our IT dept was way worse than having to retype things.)

Still don't know what exactly went wrong but wanting to back up my parents' site, the data on the server was deleted. ACK!

When I was at university the hard drive on the School of Information Systems main file server crashed. This was the machine that stored all the lecturer's files, all the CS and CISD student's files, etc.. Well, no problem, just replace the drive and then restore the files from the backup tape, right? Uh, no... Turns out that the tape drive wouldn't read the backup tapes, any of them, and whatever had caused the problem had been going on longer than the cycling of tapes through the system, so all the tapes were trashed.

that's so awful

i backed up tonight!

i'm backing up right now!

When Apple forced me to give a name to my iPod, I chose the name "ass." Yesterday, when backing it up on iTunes, the title bar at the top of the window said "Backing up 'ass.'"

Always back up. My God, it's no joke people. I was explaining to a friend of mine a few weeks ago my network-topology-in-brief, how I have at least one back up of absolutely everything, nearly down to basic system files, and the really mission critical shit (live sites, databases) gets backed up in triplicate automatically every hour or few (rsync + crontab = yr friend). He said, "That's insane. You are an insane person." No, I'm not! I am the person who doesn't lose big chunks of irreplaceable data, that's the person I am. Laugh while you can, no-backup boy.

xpost HA!

Total HD failure about six years ago. Fortunately I back up the magazine I work on to DVD (CD back then) every issue, so the main work loss was archived email. Kind of a big deal at the time, but it could have been a lot worse. Now I have Time Machine backing up everything as well as archiving work stuff to DVD.

My laptop was stolen in February. I lost far far too much irretrievable stuff because the last valid backup I'd made was from early December. I finally got my business financial data reconstructed a few weeks ago, but there's so much I can't get back. Ridiculous and all my own stupid fault. So yeah, in addition to being completely paranoid about locking doors and windows, I'm also obsessively backing up and emailing code to myself.

good. i'm so sorry.

tbh i could care less if my whole computer system up and died, so long as i have the work

To add to the obsessions: it's not a backup until you've tried to restore from it. Know a few people who've been burnt when their backups turned out to be useless/not bootable/otherwise crap.

I srsly need to get another HD. TimeMachine's meant to make it stupidly easy to backup and I still don't do it very regularly.

Time Machine restores and boots perfectly as you last backed it up (provided, of course, that you still have your Leopard install disk). My other critical OS is Linux, and I have also successfully restored everything important to it. You do have to reinstall the OS, though. I tried to keep a fully-bootable backup copy once, like a whole second OS, but it always gets just enough out of sync to not be bootable anymore, and anyway that's a little excessive. Now I use flyback, which is a Time Machine clone, of sorts. Windows, I could give a shit. It's a testing machine. Nothing is on it. Though I do keep all the Adobe programs installed there, just in case my Mac blows up tomorrow.

My computer died right after college. Lost all my work, all my college photos (including lots of irreplaceable pictures of sentimental value), and all the music I'd downloaded since I first discovered napster and kazaa (excepting a small portion I had on my iPod). The music was the hardest part. College was the first time I had broadband and I have obsessive tendencies esp. when it comes to music meant I had a very large, very fussily curated collection of music. I cried so much my eyes were red for days, not very dignified.

I ended a friendship over it. A friend had been helping me maintain my computer and I blamed him for not warning me that the situation was so dire. Not really fair on my part but I wasn't feeling too rational. Nowadays, I have two backup hard drives that update automatically (plus a high capacity iPod). When my neighbor's house caught on fire and it looked like it might spread to mine (it didn't, luckily), I grabbed my hard drive and legged it. No fucking around. Never again.

yeah.

i'm confused about this talk of booting from the external. why would it be a problem? like if i'm backing up music i'm working on, i shouldn't have any problem uploading it in the event of a crash, right?

i got one of these lacie ruggeds

I back up semi-regularly using Super Duper. Never felt comfortable using Time Machine, don't know why. Haven't backed up ever since I replaced my internal HD from 320 to 500. Gonna wait until I get another external 500 to back up again. Hoping things don't conk on in the meantime.

Surm: files, like music, are one thing. Configurations of things can be quite another. Anyone can consciously drag and drop music files (though that's a little bit inefficient as a backup method), but, like, what about all your precious Photoshop patterns and brushes? (For an example.) Not to mention your network configurations, databases or servers you might have running, preferences for the piddliest little things that you would NEVER think are important to back up, but in the event of a major crash take days and weeks to put back the way you want them.

BTW, as I was saying above about Linux, it isn't really important that the backup be bootable independent of the current installed OS. TimeMachine doesn't even let you do that. Just that when you click the restore button, it ALL comes back the way you had it.

Love the Lacie "drop it off a building" design. Chunky, clunky, heavy, reassuring.

i've not backed up anything but all my photos to DVDs in some time now. I dont have any work or creative mission-critical stuff on my PCs really, and a lot of stuff I'd not want to lose is out in "the cloud" (on websites, saved in gmail, that sort of thing) so thats a backup of a sort too.

Having said that I've bought a cute lil red WD passport 350gb and I gotta back up all my photos and music and shit, cos I've just been lucky, really.

Were I using personal laptops for anything like work, money or theses, there is NO WAY I wouldnt have regular backups though.

yeah the lacie design is hot.

re: the drag and drop, i actually just save the files twice, one on each hard drive. for some reason a simple drag 'n drop makes me nervous.

Windows or Mac? There's always a better way than that.

Mac. what should i do

Leopard? Use Time Machine.

i've pretty much learned not to grow attached to anything on my computer

Just stick it all on the internet, everyone knows theres no way you can lose ANYTHING once it gets out there ;_;

Seconding Time Machine. I picked up a 1TB drive from Other World Computing for $200 and it's totally worth it.

Jeez, storage is getting cheaper even faster than I realized.

Page bookmarked for future reference.

Currently using a refurbished WD 2TB drive I got for a little under $200 -- a separate 1 TB drive is unplugged and acts as an initial backup for earlier stuff, and am planning on getting at least one or two further 2 TB drives for duplication and backup (keeping one of them with my folks so it's safe at a distance, just in case).

Back in the days of home recording, I would stay up until the small hours backing up projects from my 10GB Akai HD recorder to the painfully slow SCSI CD burner. A couple of years later I thought it might be a good idea to combine all these CD-Rs onto a couple of DVD-Rs but it was actually pointless - the Akai wrote backups with its own proprietary file system so there was no way any of those discs could be copied to anything else and back again and still be useful. The copies just wouldn't be readable. (That's not really a horror story, just a mild irritation).

I used to run backups from the old laptop to a 250GB WD MyBook but I've gotten out of the habit. I've been using the MyBook as a file repository for the new laptop (which is where all the photos now live). So, right now, all 2009 photos are on both the new laptop and the MyBook and all 2000-08 photos are on both the new laptop, the old laptop and buried in the most recent old-laptop backup (Jan 2009?) on the MyBook. I need a better system.

In about 3 months I'll be at less than 10% disc space on the new laptop so some stuff will just have to be archived off. Once I've done that though, it only exists in one place - the external HDD. (Unless I burn a stack of DVD-Rs too).

my old old computer broke and I've now replaced it, but I'm still putting off trying to transfer the hard drive contents in case that was the problem. Seven years of my (admittedly shit) music, academic and other writing, piles and piles of music, e-mail exchanges with my girlfriend, etc etc etc, with, idiotically, none of those relatively small files backed up on my 500gb external drive. Sheeeeeit.

Currently using a refurbished WD 2TB drive I got for a little under $200 -- a separate 1 TB drive is unplugged and acts as an initial backup for earlier stuff, and am planning on getting at least one or two further 2 TB drives for duplication and backup (keeping one of them with my folks so it's safe at a distance, just in case).

― Ned Raggett, Tuesday, 28 July 2009 05:22 (7 hours ago) Permalink

wow, now i feel like a hack...

Don't mind Ned. He's a total size queen.

Just stick it all on the internet, everyone knows theres no way you can lose ANYTHING once it gets out there ;_;

i wish there was an archival/back-up thing which did this. as it is, i have one external HD and back docs up to it regularly occasionally. but all my music is on the external HD, not the main one...but getting another external HD to back up an external HD seems ridiculous, where would it end?

I'm using an online service called SugarSync as backup now, in addition to regular hd and cd/dvd backups that I send to places besides where I live/work (in case my house or town is destroyed in a disaster that I survive, lol?) With SugarSync the changes I make on files are automatically updated in the cloud, and when I use another computer it syncs with those changes automatically too. So it doesn't really do version control like Time Machine, but I handle that manually every time I start a major revision anyway (so Time Machine, when I was using it, was just double version control).

what is version control/double version control?

I've heard lots of good things about JungleDisk as an online backup service. Costs money though.

Mozy gives you 2GB of backup space for free.

The pisspoor upload rate of my DSL connection is what's keeping me from these services. Can't imagine how long it'd take to upload the initial 500GB.

I've also heard CD binders are an excellent backup alternative.

For instance, when you're writing an article, you might want to save revisions separately, so that you can go back to them later (that's the "control" you have over your "versions"). This is especially useful if the article is being written collaboratively.

the "united arabs amirites" thread that was gone when the sandpit got deleted

that was an xp to surm

SugarSync costs money; I paid $25 for 10 gigs for one year. I think it's gone up in both price and storage amount since I began earlier this year. Def. not 500 gigs! And yeah, throttled uploads kill this initially; even my initial 3 gig upload took most of a day.

i wish there was an archival/back-up thing which did this. as it is, i have one external HD and back docs up to it regularly occasionally. but all my music is on the external HD, not the main one...but getting another external HD to back up an external HD seems ridiculous, where would it end?

― lex pretend, Tuesday, July 28, 2009 2:46 PM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

if you can't afford to lose your music then this is a disaster waiting to happen.

My strategy:

All code, science writing in version control
Time Machine of home directory to external HDD (at work so laptop only sees this during the week)
Weekly clone of entire laptop disk (don't trust Time Machine yet) to same HDD
Daily sync of my PhD stuff (writing, data, code, etc.) from laptop to desktop
Weekly sync of research (i.e. my job) to data center in LA

Would feel better if I had another HDD with a Time Machine/clone of HDD. Should probably keep one at home. Music and video my main concern there: too much data to sync that around the net.

Totally off the topic of this discussion, but w/r/t data loss: I'm in love with Disintegration Loops. Losing your data can be beautiful!

Also, I backup all my papers to a thumbdrive and then email myself more important stuff.

am going out to buy HDs now

I'm in love with Disintegration Loops. Losing your data can be beautiful!

yeah well, guess what format I own Disintegration Loops in.

Parchment.

Degraded magnetic tape?

http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/rosetta.gif

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKLrY8NDZLs

> In about 3 months I'll be at less than 10% disc space on the new laptop

lol, every computer i've ever owned looks like this (work computer)

prompt> df -h
Filesystem  Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
c:          145G  142G  2.3G  99% /cygdrive/c <- main system disk
g:          456G  446G   11G  98% /cygdrive/g <- network drive, not mine
i:           19G   18G  1.3G  94% /cygdrive/i <- old ogg player, now portable drive
l:          7.5G  7.5G   35M 100% /cygdrive/l <- new ogg player
p:          4.9G  3.3G  1.7G  67% /cygdrive/p <- page file partition
z:          3.9G  3.6G  318M  92% /cygdrive/z <- usb drive

the 1TB disk i have at home has 300G spare on it though. woot. but isn't backed up anywhere (is all ripped from cds)

On the old, old, old desktop (the Windows 95 machine), I think I hovered at 20MB free (of 1GB) for about two years. And then it blew up.

I forgot about Mr. Jaq's data tragedy of burning 100s of CDs to a MyBook which succumbed to death with a horrible low grinding noise one day. He was all triumphant though, b/c instead of selling off all the physical discs (which I wanted badly to do, to just get rid of them), he had stored them in his mom's basement. So theoretically we still have all those tracks and eventually he will take months and months to burn them all again (yeah, right).

In the second semester of my freshman year at college (1998) I took several academic courses & one each in computer graphics & photography. In the tail end of the term, during which finals & final essays were taking place & final projects & class portfolios were due, I had a backpack stolen from my car. It contained: a CD discman & a couple of CDs; most of my class & reading notes (maybe all of them - I can't remember); a binder containing sleeved negatives; multiple (lol)Zip discs with design projects stored within (this was before I owned my own computer & at the time, the university only gave students 100 mbs or so of server storage).

The worst thing about the experience was envisioning whatever desperate cretin went to the trouble to break into my for the thing rifling through the pack, grabbing the discman (probably cursing what a lame consolation prize it was for their efforts), & tossing the rest in a dumpster somewhere. I don't remember what I had to do to recover from that, but it must have been really difficult.

arg that's terrifying. Esp the negs.

Yeah, thankfully I kept a separate binder for recent & class-related negs, which were then later added to a master archive, so its not like I lost my life's work (which would have constituted about one year at that point lol) or anything. Still, yeah that sucked. I don't think it made that much of a difference in the class though, b/c enough prints had already been made from many of the negs to cobble together a class portfolio. It was mainly about not ever being able to replace the good shots I got during those months. The rest of the stuff, however, unfortunately did really throw a wrench in the works of finishing up my courses. I did it somehow, though.