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It's funny. Laugh. Data Storage

Top 10 Ways To Lose Your Data 400

Posted by CowboyNeal from the email-and-mp3s-of-the-damned dept.
bettiwettiwoo writes "The BBC has a article on the Top 10 Ways To Lose Your Data due to the human factor. According to Kroll Ontrack, a recovery firm, the top ten include: laptop being shot in anger (naturally); laptop fell off a moped and was run over by lorry (some laptops just weren't meant to live); server rescued after running unchecked 24/7 for years under layers of dust and dirt; and my personal favourite, laptop dropped in bath while doing company accounts. One of my sister-in-laws apparently repeatedly lost data while writing university assignments by kicking the plug to her desktop out of its socket. It was never really clear to me why she didn't avoid (much) of that problem by using frequent automatic backup, but she didn't. Instead she had her mother pop in at regular intervals to remind her to save manually."
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Top 10 Ways To Lose Your Data

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  • And then there was this 500 Internal Server Error and my wit and wisdom were lost forever to the bit bucket in the sky.
    • And then there was this 500 Internal Server Error and my wit and wisdom were lost forever to the bit bucket in the sky.

      The webserver was like "Beep Beep!" ...It was a very good Slashdot post.

    • "And then there was this 500 Internal Server Error and my wit and wisdom were lost forever to the bit bucket in the sky."

      That's happenned to me several times in the last 2 weeks ... a reload usually cured it.

  • But it does not include. (Score:4, Funny)

    by mlk ( 18543 ) <michael DOT lloy ... AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday October 16, 2003 @08:31PM (#7235993) Homepage Journal
    I asked BOFH for more space...

  • Hmmm (Score:2)

    by daeley ( 126313 ) *
    Laptop being shot in anger (naturally); laptop fell off a moped and was run over by lorry

    Wasn't this a scene in the last Matrix movie? ;)

  • The last time I had a catastrophic loss... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Jerk City Troll ( 661616 ) on Thursday October 16, 2003 @08:31PM (#7236000) Homepage

    Beware your RAID-0 arrays. Screwing carelessly with these setups can cause you many problems, data interleaving and all that.

  • PC thrown out the window to destroy evidence before police arrived

    I think a few pounds of thermite would have worked better. As an added bonus, you'll destroy evidence in the entire house when it burns down! ;)

    • Argh, typical geek humour: "No, destroy something using something increasingly bigger explosives!". Shurrup.
      • Argh, typical geek humour: "No, destroy something using something increasingly bigger explosives!". Shurrup.

        OK, I admit... maybe thermite is overkill. If the case was left open with a blow torch handy, I think that would be good enough. Depending on how much the data is worth to the government, they're really not going to waste resources on recovering extremely damaged data unless they have a reason to do so.

    • a few pounds of thermite

      You must be thinking of a burn barrel. The Navy uses these to destroy classified documents in case of an enemy boarding. Throw the docs in, light the thermite, push it over the side.

    • I have a friend who keeps a hammer next to his box, but i think having a block of thermite in a spare drive bay or wrapping the case in det-cord would be a bit more effective.
    • DUDE!@ you totally ripped that idea off from the screen savers [techtv.com] last night!

  • Next Week on Slashdeet (News for the Oblivious) (Score:3, Funny)

    by The Briguy ( 612887 ) on Thursday October 16, 2003 @08:33PM (#7236011) Journal
    This week, its 10 ways to lose your data.
    Next week: 10 ways to get AOL
    10 ways to play cards

  • Social engineering (Score:3, Funny)

    by Decaffeinated Jedi ( 648571 ) on Thursday October 16, 2003 @08:34PM (#7236022) Homepage Journal
    One of my sister-in-laws apparently repeatedly lost data while writing university assignments by kicking the plug to her desktop out of its socket. It was never really clear to me why she didn't avoid (much) of that problem by using frequent automatic backup, but she didn't.
    Or, there's always the alternative solution of just not kicking the plug out of its socket.
    • or liberal application of duct tape
    • Here's a story of computer mayhem along that vein.

      Many seasons ago when I was but a mite in high school, I found out about this cool new software. Something I had never heard about called ICQ. (Yes, this is when ICQ was still relatively new and most people had not heard of it.)

      So after a while my friend convinced me to install it on my own machine. There I was, installing this new and strange piece of software ... and all of a sudden, the monitor goes totally black. No warning, no error message, no

  • Laptops. (Score:4, Funny)

    by saintlupus ( 227599 ) on Thursday October 16, 2003 @08:34PM (#7236025)
    Common conversation where I work.

    I hold up the battered, scratched, often bent laptop with a broken screen.

    "So what happened here?"

    "Well, I put the laptop on top of my car, and it slid off."

    "Slid off."

    "Right. Slid right off the roof."

    "You didn't happen to, I don't know, drive away, causing this mysterious slippage, did you?"

    [ashamed silence]

    "I thought so."

    --saint

    • Re:Laptops. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Artifex ( 18308 )
      Does your company hold people accountable for paying for damage when they do things like this?

      One of my former bosses had a convertible, which, according to gossip, would often be parked with the top down when he went bar hopping... his laptops and phones and pagers were often "disappearing" out of his car, or his apartment when he'd "get lucky" with guys from the bars, but I don't think he was ever held responsible for the losses.

      Of course, if us engineers damaged equipment while doing actual work, we'd
      • When something like that happens, you can get your desktop support group to help you out. Sure, company policy may say that he needs to get his laptop back, but wouldn't it be a shame if the newest backup that was on file was 3 months ago, forcing your nimrod of a boss to redo everything. Oh, and I'm sorry about the pager, but you'll have to get one with a different number, unless you want to wait 2-3 weeks.
    • Why did you bring me this pile of dust?

      It's my laptop. It got blown up.

      Blown up?

      Well, first someone put it in the microwave.

      Well, I could see that making it smoke a bit, and possibly cracking the screen...

      Then there were the lasers. That vaporized a chunk. And the elephants.

      The elephants?

      Don't get me started on the elephants. They were almost as bad as the marching band that walked over it. Of course, I could have fixed it at that point, but then someone installed Windows XP on it without the la

  • Hmmm (Score:2)

    by Otter ( 3800 )
    According to Kroll Ontrack...

    My first thought was -- now, that's an odd name. Turkish,maybe?

    Now I'm wondering if Havoc Pennington is a person or a company.

  • If a backup is no good, attempting to fix a minor proplem by restoring from it can leave you worse off than when you started.
    I know several people who have shot themselves in the foot this way.
    • A decent backup regimen sometimes backfires... if you're stupid enough to mess it up!

      A few years back I had some severe problems with my computer; eventually turned out the L2 cache card had gone bad. Before that revelation though, I was living through random freezes but had no choice but to plod on and make frequent saves (university assignments you see).

      One crash was real bad though--corrupted filesystem. Norton was able to get the system bootable again, did a quick check and nothing too obvious was b

  • Sometimes water can FIX dataloss. (Score:3, Funny)

    by enkidu ( 13673 ) on Thursday October 16, 2003 @08:43PM (#7236095) Homepage Journal
    Back in the days of 3.5" diskettes being big enough to hold multiple documents, a secretary came to me, practically in tears, holding a very grungy and sticky 3.5" disk. She said it had all of her important documents and (of course) it was her only copy. She kept it in her purse and her hair gel had leaked all over it. Needless to say, it had completely gummed up the disk, even seeping into the disk itself. I couldn't even open the gate.

    I said I'd try to see what I could do. I carefully cracked the case open and wiped off the sticky gunk with warm water. I then opened another good floppy, replaced the disk with the cleaned and dried formerly gunky disk. I said a brief prayer to the Woz and put it in the computer. Hey presto! We immediately read all of the information and made three copies for her to have. One for her purse, one for her desk and one for her home. I kept the original disk on my office wall labelled "Lazarus" until the day I quit. Ah, the days of multiple grain sized magnetic domains...

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday October 16, 2003 @08:46PM (#7236119)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Funny, I was just surfing around trying to find a more elegant way of doing tape backups on Mac OSX, I got bored and popped back to /. only to see this article.

    Anybody have any good (and free, this is a personal system) suggestions for doing archives to a DDS3 drive?

    And yes, the "Server" in question here is old enough such that it came with onboard SCSI.

  • Swiffer (Score:2, Funny)

    by G4Outcast ( 716804 )
    A friend of mine was installing a DVD drive on his friend's computer. While he stepped away for a second to get something, his friend thought it would be a good idea to Swiffer the motherboard because it was "dusty". No data was lost, but that's a really great way to screw up your motherboard. That's an expensive mistake she'll never make again!
  • Also, don't forget, these are only the accidents/incidents for machines submitted for recovery. By far the most common way to lose data is probably to lose your laptop in the airport, either forgetting it or having it stolen. I remember reading an article about airport lost and founds getting thousands of these yearly. Considering that few people run encryption, that's an incredible industrial disaster waiting to happen.

  • One of my sister-in-laws apparently repeatedly lost data while writing university assignments by kicking the plug to her desktop out of its socket. It was never really clear to me why she didn't avoid (much) of that problem by using frequent automatic backup, but she didn't.

    No joke! I have had this happen to me COUNTLESS times at a previous job due to poor placement of the power outlet. And auto-save may save your ass when working in Word or Open Office, I don't know of too many programming editors that

  • Another stupid way to loose data (Score:5, Funny)

    by MrDelSarto ( 95771 ) on Thursday October 16, 2003 @09:02PM (#7236236) Homepage
    When showing some people around your very impressive computer room say: see this! It's a hot plug RAID array for one of our production file servers with a couple of hundred gigabytes of storage. I could just pull any one of these drives out right now and no one would even notice. In fact, let me demonstrate ...

    Unfortunatley it wasn't as redundant as he expected :(

    • Not much of a RAID array now was it?

      The stories of RAID arrays failing when they shouldn't is kind of amusing in a scary kind of way.

      I actually did just that, but by accident, with my computer and a RAID 1 array. I was messing around with a failing fan when I oh-so-cleverly pulled out the power plug of one of the hard disks. Even though this is just a cheap controller (no hot swapping), it did not crash the computer. Instead, I just had a little pop up dialog along the lines of "Master drive on control
    • Former coworker told me about his first real sysadmin job. Running RAID5 on a cluster of Netware servers. He was telling the CIO about how a single disk failure would go by without a problem, so the CIO pulled a random disk, no problem, then he opened his mouth and talked about how a single system failure would not effect their largest customer who ran on that cluster, well the CIO asks him if he's sure about that, he says not really but he believes so. The CIO tells him his job depends on it as he pulls th
    • done that! actually, i pulled 2 on a 4-disk raid... had i waited, it would have rebuilt itself, but the errors that occured shortly after the drive swap made me panic and reinstall... o well, another lesson learned.
  • ... I just save it all to SourceSafe.
  • I'm glad that Simon and Garfunkel are finally moving into the 21st century.

    Don't save your file, kyle

    Drop your machine, dean

    Rip out the cable, Abel

    Just listen to me.

    Hit delete, Pete

    I don't need to repeat

    Theres ten ways to set your data free.
  • I once had the joy of supporting users of MS Exchange. For some reason I needed to delete and re-create someones exchange account (as you do). I'd moved all their important exchange folders somewhere during the procedure, deleted, created and moved them back, gave them a call and told them that whatever problem they were having was solved (as you do) and left it at that.

    Five minutes later they're on the phone again asking where a whole load of their information is! I log in to their account, have a nose
  • They forgot blowtorch [nslug.ns.ca]

  • Rubik's Disk Drive (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Thursday October 16, 2003 @09:17PM (#7236334) Homepage
    I used to have a UNIX system (Multibus 10 MHz 68010) that had an 8" floppy disk drive for backing up files. The file backup software would write a track on the floppy and immediately read the track to verify the integrity of the data. This worked fine until some bits in the track selection logic of the floppy drive failed. After that, the drive would position the head on a semi-random track when it received a head positioning command. The backup software continued to run without any reported errors. The problem was discovered when the hard disk was replaced and I attempted to restore the filesystem. Every floppy disk in the backup set was hopelessly scrambled.
  • How I lost my data. I spent several months trying to get a Traven tape drive to work in Linux so I could back up my server. I never did get a backup to work. So a few weeks ago the power supply blew and took out both hard drives with all my precious data.

    Screw Seagate for saying the Traven had native support in Linux. And screw the hard drive makers for making drives that were killed so easily.

    Oh, and screw myself for not giving up on the tape drive and coming up with a backup policy that worked.
    • I have several Travan "write only" tape drives. Not only can they not read tapes written by other drives, they have a difficult time reading their own tapes.
    • "Traven" tapes? As your experience indicates, their motto must be:

      Backups? We ain't got no backups! We don' need no stinking backups!

      (OK, OK, -1 obscure)
    • At the time when you were trying to use the Travesty^h^h^hn cheap-ass tape drives to backup your critical data, had you ever ventured out onto that new-fangled thing called the Internet?

      Because if you had, let me tell you, you would have seen "fucking" next to Traven more often than any other word. And you'd find it pretty quickly.
  • The computers at my university are running XP, for some reason, probably due to some weird setup, will erase teh usb memory card if it is plugged in when you log in, and try to use it as your working directory. I only ever lost data once this way, and not anything I didn't have a backup of, but I still think it weird that it would delete data without even telling or asking you.
  • a computer story that starts out:
    "I was not aware that Nairobi has a great problem with monkeys which cause a lot of nuisance."

    I remember once, I left my laptop by my window and left for lunch. When I came back I found a monkey sitting at it typing the complete work of Shakespear.

    He mis-spelled "thee", stupid monkey.

  • heh.. I've seen a good one (Score:4, Funny)

    by marcushnk ( 90744 ) <senectus@gmaiCOWl.com minus herbivore> on Thursday October 16, 2003 @09:22PM (#7236364) Journal
    Silly wench put her brand new 6 k IBM thinkpad on the electric stove while she "powdered her nose", when she came back it was a black smokey mess. :-D I still rib her about it..
  • ...by sending random commands to the hard disk controller. Of course, it was the one and only HD on the PC, and being the typical engineer had no backups. And of course, he sent some command that does a factory reset (or similar) of the whole controller hardware, thereby turning his HD into a large doorstop, losing at least a month's worth of development on that and other projects.

    I feel I should add a moral, but that wasn't the first time, and won't be the last, that he lost large quantities of data.

  • Let's see. Had a call once, she couldn't get her computer to work, and her first paper as a freshman in college was about due. Her room mate had used it w/o problem the night before though, but I, 200 miles away, seemed a better person to ask ...

    "Is the power on?". The questioning silence was a clue, and I asked the question again, this time receiving a response. "The thing with all the plugs in it is lit up, if that's what you mean"

    That was a start, so I asked her to press the power button on the com

  • back when win2k beta was out, i decided to try it out.. I converted the drives to ntfs and everything.. after it rebooted a few times, it was installed and all of the sudden.. it wouldnt let me copy files in any way... no copy/paste, no drag/drop, command prompt didnt want to work.. nothing.
    i rebooted the machine... same thing...
    i decided to try to read the files with a linux boot disk.. no such luck... something about it being a new version of ntfs or something... so i tried the recovery disks... ...they d
  • There is story that circulates amongst astronomers that an irate astronomer once emptied their pistol into the main mirror of the telescope at McDonald Observatory in Texas. (Bear in mind that this mirror would have been polished to an accuracy of about 1/20,000 of a millimeter.) Supposedly the mirror did not crack, so they just painted the damaged areas black and still use it.

    (I never observed there, so I can't personally verify this story. I only found one reference [astronomysite.com] on the web.)

  • Master's Degree, eh? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Morel ( 67425 ) <[eugenio] [at] [invisibleinfo.com]> on Thursday October 16, 2003 @09:37PM (#7236452)
    From the article:

    I have lost all my files last
    month. I was upgrading my
    computer hard disk. I forgot to
    back up my data. All my files
    gone. What a shame, although
    I have a Masters degree in
    computer science, I ignored
    the most basic step to safe
    guide your data.
    Michael Chan, Malaysia

    Yes, Alex. I'll take "People you should NEVER hire" for $200.
  • My most catastrophic data loss so far occured 3 weeks ago. I plugged a new drive into a hot swap raid chassis. It would have been good if it had been the chassis with no data. Instead, I plugged it into the one with our accounting data, and the SCSI BIOS flipped out and lost all my data. PHBs, protect your data. Sysadmins, protect yourselfs. Advocate the distribution of free coffee within your office... before it's too late.
    • Reminds me of the HP tech that came out to replace the dead disk in our AV system's RAID array, for some reason when he plugged the new disk in the controller started recreating the array, FROM the new disk instead of TO it! Luckily all the data was mearly local cache of the corporate AV repository, instead of real data loss we just had a slow WAN for a couple days =)
  • A rubber mallet used on a hard drive just before the end of the warranty period.

  • Laptop dropped onto freeway at ~80mph, survives. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by zbuffered ( 125292 ) on Thursday October 16, 2003 @09:47PM (#7236507)
    If you want to read a great story about how a web developer's laptop was lost (no data lost, as he keeps full backups at all times) and then found, read this first thread: Out Of The Frying Pan, Into The Fire [cycleforums.com]
    followed by the second thread: Un Fookin Believeable. Laptop Found. [cycleforums.com]

    The guy that finds his laptop e-mails him and tells him this great story.

    The story is worth a read, check it out!

  • That's silly.. (Score:2, Funny)

    by thanq ( 321486 )
    (...)Instead she had her mother pop in at regular intervals to remind her to save manually.

    That's just plain silly and thoughtless.

    She should have had her mother AND her father AND her brother remind her to save work. Everyone knows that multiple redundant backups are a way to go.

    On a second thought, however, if you have only a mother constantly reminding you to do something it's already redundant and you are only utlizing minimum resources.... BRILLIANT!

  • C'mon, these folk aren't even trying.

    "I went over to Mrs X's house to help fix a virus. Well one thing led to another and the bedroom. We had the laptop going (recording USB cam) when Mr X walked in...."

    In the old pre-Carley [btw: don't correct me and tell me it's actually Carly or Karley or something. I don't care] HP days they had a publication called "HP Journal". Each issue had an article on how a piece of HP kit had survived a serious mechanical incident (car crash, fire etc...). My favourite was the o

  • Over the past couple of years, I have had three hard drives go bad in Mac laptops running OS X. Prior to OS X, I hadn't had any problems with drives going bad.

    In each of these cases, the problem turned out to be a hardware problem and, no I wasn't shooting the computers out of a canon or something crazy like described in the article.

    Do you think this is OS X, or could it be that today's larger hard drives are more prone to failure because they have a lot more sectors that each could go bad? (Or am I just
  • "Oh, I was just cleaing up, I saw all these files, but I don't use them at all, so I deleted them..."
  • Circa 1992, I had two separate hard drives on my Amiga, and I backed up one to the other. I figured, it's a LOT cheaper than a tape drive, and way faster than floppies.

    A hard drive fails to spin up one morning.

    Ten minutes later, I wreck the second one while trying to pull the first one out of the system (I still don't know how exactly).

    Lost about 5 years' worth of stuff...
  • I remember back several years ago hearing about an entire automobile design that was lost by General Motors when their server died. They did regular backups and the backups worked fine. Just to be safe, they ran a verify program on the backup, then put the tape in storage. Turns out the verify program erased the backups! The whole project was cancelled when they discovered several years of data had been lost.

    Funny I can't find a reference on google.

  • Back around 1995, a friend of mine told me his story. His father was an engineer, and had what was at the time a VERY fast computer.

    My friend installed Linux on it, and decided to take it off. He decided that "rm -rf /" would do the trick, so he issued the command, and left the room.

    A few minutes later, he remembered that he had his father's DOS partition mounted when he issued the command. He ran back, but it was too late. All of his father's engineering work was gone. : )

    steve

  • It's not immediately apparent from the photo [festing.org], but the drive's heads actually cut completely through the platter, leaving the rest of the drive hanging by a thread.

    This drive was in an old server I covertly colocated at my high school many years ago, right before I graduated. Three weeks later, the server stopped responding. Two months later, one of my co-conspirator managed to gain access to the poor machine, which he reported as making a whole lot of noise. I opened the drive, washed out the copious q

  • Workin' for higher education (Score:3, Funny)

    by dswensen ( 252552 ) on Thursday October 16, 2003 @11:14PM (#7237032) Homepage
    When I was a lab monitor at my university many years ago, every year at the end of the semester we'd have graduate students doing comp exams. This involved 3-4 hours of intense typing on the computer, composing lengthy Word documents.

    Before the comp exams one year, the professor came up to me and asked, "Do the students need to know anything special about working on the lab computers?"

    "Tell them to save their work."

    "Anything else?"

    "No. Save early save often."

    He turns and tells them they may begin. He does not, in fact, tell them to save their work. At all.

    Two hours later, a graduate student comes up to me, dissolved in tears, because Word has crashed and her paper is gone. I take a look. No saved document. No temp file. I tell her, though not in so many words, that she is screwed.

    The professor, who has a Ph.D. and makes about six times what I do, demands in high dudgeon that I produce the document immediately, as the student "needs it to graduate." I shrug and say sorry, if she'd saved her work, she wouldn't be having this problem.

    The punch line is the exact same thing happened the next semester. After that I started going around before comps and telling the students personally to save their work, as the professor apparently still considered it of no importance. What the students themselves were thinking, I have no clue.

    A close cousin to this was when we'd redo the network at the end of every semester and clean off all the computers, asking the faculty first if they had any data they needed to preserve. How many times did they confidently say "no, nothing at all" and descend on us in a blind fury the next week when they discovered Invaluable Powerpoint Presentation X was missing? I lost count.

  • Sometimes you get lucky... (Score:4, Funny)

    by oren ( 78897 ) on Friday October 17, 2003 @04:53AM (#7238094)
    It is 2AM after a week of 3/4-hour sleep nights. "The crunch". The demo version must be ready in 48 hours to show the investors, or the company is tanked. You know, the good old days...

    We were so zonked we were pair programing, to keep each other from making dumb mistakes. This was before XP was a gleam in Beck's eyes - around 85. But we were that desperate....

    At any rate, I'm in this directory with a zillion files we don't need. And one file we *really* need. Just finished a few hours of very delicate work on. Crown jewels sort of thing.

    You guessed it... I type "rm *".

    It took me a milisecond to understand what I've just done. Simultaneously the girl next to me (yes, we actually had some female programmers back then, imagine) shrieks "Noooooooo!".

    I hit Control-C faster than a blink. And then, with trembling fingers, "ls".

    And there it was. One file, out of the multitude that were in this directory. Our crown jewels.

    I turn around and tell here "What? We only needed this one anyway!"

    The look on her face was worth my heart stopping a second before.

    BTW, we did beat the deadline, presented a demo, got the money, and then spent a month recovering the code from the results of this one-week massacre. I was a green rookie at the time, and this has taught me the value of "40 hours weeks" in a way you never forget.

    And that every once in a while, Lady Luck _does_ smile on you...

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