Data Loss Disasters - Rage, Stupidity, and Butter Fingers
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If you haven’t dropped any electronics equipment, or dropped anything on top of electronics equipment, you’re a lot more graceful than average; even celebrities do it. Take British comedian Dom Joly; when he dropped his laptop, he feared the loss of the five thousand photos, six thousand songs, half a book he was writing and all of his old newspaper columns. More anonymously, one woman who was rearranging her home office managed to drop a five pound piece of pottery on her laptop; inevitably, it landed right on the hard drive area. The contents were no less precious to her; it contained a book she had been working on for five years and 150-year-old genealogy pictures that she had not yet printed out.
Then there are the cases where you have to wonder what they were thinking. For instance, one Ontrack customer set an old banana down on top of an external hard drive. Well, those things get hot, and the banana’s contents seeped into the drive, causing it to stop running. The drive was recoverable; the same could not be said for the banana. Another case where the person really should have known better involved a university professor. His hard drive was squeaking, so he opened the case and sprayed the inside with WD-40. It stopped squeaking…mainly because it stopped working.
Accidents also claim a fair amount of data, including accidental deletions. One Ontrack customer reformatted his hard drive ten times before he realized that he’d stored some valuable information on it that he still needed. In another case, a man accidentally deleted all of his child’s baby pictures – and his wife hinted at divorce if he couldn’t get them back. Disklabs had a client who was showing a friend how to delete data on the spare hard drive, and deleted the wrong one.
And then there’s something that should perhaps be called computer rage. Disklabs had to recover data from a server that had been kicked to death by the IT manager. The manager had just been fired from the job, and decided if he was going down, he was taking the server with him. But many of these cases are more like domestic disputes, such as the client’s wife who thought he was cheating on her and snapped his Motorola V3 Razor in half. Disklabs received only half of the phone, but was still able to recover the data. In another case, a Disklabs client saw his irate wife throw his laptop down a 60 foot well.
Of course, my personal favorite doesn’t involve spouses. One frustrated writer took a hammer to her computer. The hammer imprint was clearly visible on the top cover of the machine. As a writer myself, I can certainly relate!
A Few Disaster Prevention and Recovery Tips
What should you do if you’re facing a potential data loss disaster? That depends in part on the nature of the disaster. If it’s a hurricane, and you have had any time to prepare beforehand, use a surge protector so your data isn’t fried when the power comes back on. Even if you do use a surge protector, it isn’t a bad idea to turn off and unplug your system before you actually lose power.
If your system gets a little or even somewhat wet, you might actually get lucky and not lose any data, but you’d better let your components dry out completely before you plug them back in or try to turn them on. That goes for anything that’s battery-operated as well as anything you plug in. If your system was completely underwater, you can bet that your hard drive has been damaged, and you’d better have a backup. You may still be able to recover the data, but you’ll probably have to pay a professional to do it. One data recovery engineer says there is a “60 to 90 percent chance that we can recover data from a water-damaged computer.”
So what should you do for backups? This is not meant to be a comprehensive description, but there are at least three approaches you can take. You can regularly copy your important data to a CD and store it somewhere away from your computer, such as in another room in your house, at work, in your car, or at a friend’s house. You can use an external hard drive to back up your data. Or you can back up your data via the Internet; there are a number of companies online that offer this service. Backing up your data takes time and remembering to do it, of course, but it’s worth the minor hassle to avoid the loss of precious and possibly irreplaceable data.
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