techrecovery | three stories about backups (Reply)

It's a quiet night before finals, and all through campus...people are being stupid. It's probably the anxiety.

1. Kid A has accidentally deleted his thesis. It's a very rough draft, and less than ten pages, but he'd like to get it back. Since he can recover the file on his own, I give him the instructions and he runs off. He returns a few minutes later, it won't work, it's gone for good. This time I realize that he had it only on his home server (server space for all), and I admit that yes, they do make nightly backups of the home server, but it might not have gotten his latest. Anyway, it's something that only full time staff can access. I give him instructions for possibly digging it out of AutoSave, he runs off again. When he returns, insistent that I find some way to save his file, he tells me the difference between his old copy and the new one is less than three pages. "Look," I say as gently as possible, "it's going to take more time to get an unlikely copy than it would to just rewrite the missing part. I know it sucks, but if you rewrite it now, you will probably remember a lot of it. It might even be better the second time around." The guy sees my point--and that I am incapable of helping him further--and returns to the library. I'm sorry dude, but if you only work off of your home server, it not only slows down access to everyone's server space but it prevents the nice local backup. Kudos for having a copy on the home server at all, though.

2. One of my coworkers is a second semester senior and has only one copy of her thesis anywhere: on her local machine. That's tempting fate.

And now, for a shining example of intelligence.
3. Our student body president brings in his laptop, whose hard drive had made scary clicking noises before crashing, burning and otherwise dying for good. Luckily, as soon as the clicking noises started, he saved his thesis to his home server. If only all the seniors could be as smart as our student body president.

Also, in a few weeks we will have moved everyone to IMAP and our old system of email will be no longer. There are few stragglers who insist on clinging to the old ways, mainly out of principle. I like them and bemoan the loss of Blitzmail, but really, we're not facists. It's getting old. (Look at how pretty Thunderbird is! Look at all the options for customization! I'm beginnning to feel like Sam in Green Eggs and Ham.)