Worst 'data lost' story?

bungeecork

What's your worst "I lost all of my data" story? Prompted by 2 recent threads I think it's always good to tell these stories to make people more aware of the value of their electronic data. Here are 3 stories that come to mind;

1) This is a old one going back to when floppy disks were floppy and they were all that was available. When a firms enterprise software showed corrupt data the support people asked for the (only copy of the) backup floppy that was, up to then, overwritten nightly. A junior secretary sent the floppy by courier just after she had stapled a "With Compliments" slip to it.

2) A receptionist worked on her final Uni project during her lunch hour every day for several months and saved it onto her PC at reception. Even though she had no floppy drive access and was trained to only save data to a drive share, she thought she'd "do the right thing" and save her personal work to her C: drive. During her final month at Uni, she was asked to save local documents and bookmarks to the network as her PC was being upgraded over the weekend. She didn't realise that "upgraded" in this case meant "replaced, fully wiped and given to charity". I don't know how she got on at Uni, I was too afraid of upsetting her by asking, the upset when she realised her project was gone was something to behold.

3) Someone who really should have known better opened a new Word document and then kept it open, without ever saving it, for nearly two weeks - adding to it all day every day. While he was away from his office someone else wanted to borrow his phone charger and unplugged his PC by mistake. The whole department had a go at retrieving his document before anyone called IT. Needless to say there was much heartache and a very angry customer.

Any other stories??

Stephen

Can't remember what year it was, but it was ages ago. The first time the Chernobyl (CIH) virus activated on April 26th (anniversary of Chernobyl meltdown), it owned the **** out of my poor old 486 at the time. Destroyed the primary dos partition on the disk -- all data lost, but fortunately I did not have one of the few chipsets on which it was able to corrupt the BIOS.

AnCapaillMor

I lost 180gb of TV show avi's once.

pickarooney

I had a book on a floppy once. It was almost finished.

RobertFoster

pickarooney wrote:

I had a book on a floppy once. It was almost finished.

One you wrote, or one you were reading?

NotMe

You know those recovery disks you get with every pc that are supposed to return it to factory condition? Twice I tried to use them - on two different computers - and both times they just formatted the drive and then failed... leaving me with no OS and just a blank disk.

Pa ElGrande

It's good to have backup scheme, but you should also consider how to recover too.
Had to replace a failed hard disk on a raid mirror set once, so arrived on site, and asked the IT person if she had made a good backup. She opened a drawer near the server, and took out a 1.44 Mb floppy from the hundreds of floppys there. She inserted it into the NT 4 server and ran a batch file, a few seconds later, the batch file completed and she labeled the disk with the date and put it in the drawer. "There", she said proudly "you can go ahead and replace the disk". "You arrre happy with that backup" said I suspiciously. "Yes" she said and went about her business.
So I replaced the disk, the rebuild started and completed.
While the disk rebuild was going on, I took a look at the batch file, all it did was change the archive bit (attrib) on some files and list the files it changed on floppy. As I was leaving, I bought up the subject of backup and told her she should really buy a tape drive and proper backup program like Backup Exec that allowed full scheduled backups with the benefit of ease of use. I could tell from the glazed expression in her eyes, that my advice was lost on her. So I bade her goodbye and moved on to the next call.

I still wonder if that server is running and if Mr. Murphy has ever visited that company and applied his own unique justice.

Capt'n Midnight

Once got a customers dead drive up again by replacing the board on a , a week later the drive died again , they hadn't taken the data off it in the meantime.

I met some people that had copies of disks sent to them , by fax, yeah photocopies, and then 5 1/4" floppies in a ring binder, hole punched.

Another place they were running manual backups, picking a few drive letters (shares from the local server) and backing them up, not necessarily the same ones each time so that all would be done over time !

rogue-entity

Here are my stories, some bad, some not so bad.

1) When I got my first PC, the second HDD that I got for it went foul and I lost my office97 install and since I only had a loan of the origional disk I could not get it back to reinstall it, I was really cheesed.

2) I once ran windows98 setup and formatted the entire drive wiping out all my files.

3) On my second PC, I had to wipe the drive in order to restore the PC to the factory setting after a program install fudged windows. I could not backup my files (stored as zip files) because the zips were too big to fit on a floppy and I did not have a copy of the disk compression program.

4) I also did the imfamous rm -fr / on a server, my own thank god, not to much of a problem as I just needed to reinstall linux and I was back up.

5) I once wiped out ALL partitions on my PC and the connected USB backup drive causing me to loose ALL of my personal files, music and downloaded software. Fortunatly a program called Drive Rescue was able to read the drive and find all the files allowing me to transfer the files back to the main HDD and once I reformatted the backup drive I transfered my files back. Let that be a lesson, Windows XP setup can access USB drives!

6) not so bad, my HDD died recently so I had to take the HDD from my spare PC, and since the last backup that I made was in August I lost a few files, one or two songs and anything else that was added after my last backup.
My advice, backup every week and your critical files every day. You just never know when your HDD is going to pack it in. Mine still passed the smart tests and was fine until, click-click-click...

leeroybrown

Three I remember off hand:

1) A friend had a server set up in a software RAID configuration (2 x RAID1). About a week after he set this up a serious kernel level fault occurred resulting in his file systems being heavily corrupted. The corruption was mirrored across all disks in the system with full data loss (~300Gb)

2) A hard disk failure on a linux server. The hard disk in question held data belonging to 100+ people and the backup being mantained was sufficiently out of date to make this a problem. The traditional "we can't afford data recovery so bung it in the deep-freeze" approach was chosen. 5 hours of freezing and 8 hours (it was that painfully slow) of data transfer the entire 75Gb of data had been transferred off. The disk was kept cold during this procedure by keeping the drive between two ice packs that were swapped with fresh ones regularly for the entire eight hours. No data loss but epic none the less...

3) An acquantance lost some important of data when someone borrowed (without asking) a zip disk from his home desk the day before his work PC had a full hard drive failure.

Duffman

A favourite of mine was putting in those old IDE cables (the ones without the guide bit) upsidedown... instant drive death :rolleyes:

masteroftherealm

yeah dont talk to me about ide cables i did that a few weeks ago... yes i was stil using an old cable grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Sparky

ya know those ide cables to the small ide cable adaptors, for using a 2.5" lappy drive in a pc tower, well i was putting it in a pc to would you believe back it up onto a partition of a normal drive.
Well my sis decides to help while im in the kitchen making some tea for myself, she plugs in the drive with the 2.5" drive connector the wrong way in and powers up
Drive blown in an instant.
I actually threw the thing at her in anger, 40gb of data gone., only copys i had were the print out of the invoices, i was even thinking of hiring a data restorer but his quote was enough to buy me alot of HDD's.
So now i do a dvd back up every friday night of the drive which i put all the required data like invoices quotes, sales purchases on.
It only takes 5mins. and a lesson well learned.
Dont let your sis near a pc.

robindch

...once lost two week's worth of dev work on an folding-text editor 'bout 15 years ago, but no worries, had programmed myself into a corner anyway and redid the lost stuff over the course of two days and got it working. Another guy in the same company used the editor a bit before that, and the editor went apesh*t on his disk (mentions across office conversationally, "Hey, robin, my disk has been going for twenty seconds; any ideas why?" "Reboot! Reboot!". Oh, you people with protected memory, you don't know how lucky you are.)

Anyhow, following a similar scare two years ago, now, I use a thing called ViceVersa (http://www.tgrmn.com/) and religiously backup all email and dev work once a day to multiple hosts, one of them offsite. Never again...

BigEejit

I know of cases where several hundred GB of data had to be restored from tape because the customers had not monitored their storage and had 2 failed disks in a raid array..... no-one to blame but themselves ...

Personally, my most upsetting loss was when (more than 12 years ago) I was playing a text RPG called the mines of moria from a 5 1/4" floppy and was nearly finished (kicking the Balrogs ass) when I got a media error and the game died .... I tried all sorts to copy that disk but it was a goner ...