I lost two weeks of work doing something really tricky because my harddisk got fried. I freaked out. When I got back to my senses, I sat down and wrote it all again, it took two days and was much better. But now I always push to a server, often several times a day. Git is easier than CVS that way.
I used to dabble with making music in early 00s. Had all of my raw tracks on a hard drive before the availability of affordable cloud storage.
Sometime in the mid 00s the hard drive failed and corrupted all of my files.
I still think about that every time I crave my own personal nostalgia.
Back when 3.5” floppy disks were still around, I had this happen to me. My final project for Turbo Pascal saved just fine, no errors, no problems. But when it came time to show it to my teacher, boom! That annoying message showed up: 'General failure reading drive A:'
work stuff always gets commited and pushed multiple times throughout the day.
Private stuff is on multiple hard drives and in the cloud, plus emails are on two phones, one desktop and on a hosted server. So far, that's enough. Nothing fancy.
But yeah, I had my laptop bag stolen from the back seat of my car in a parking lot.
That was ruff. It had the pictures and video of my daughter's birth on it. The SD in the camera already deleted. Luckily, I was able to restore most of it. Spend a night on that one.
A big loss was my over the years curated audio file collection that was stolen when some dipshit broke into my office and took some external harddrives.
It's been over 10 years and I'm still hurting from time to time over that one.
Not that young any more, but I'd say I've mostly stopped doing this. Maybe because I don't have that much that can't be replaced. Most relatively important stuff is in git, and worst case I haven't pushed a few days worth of changes to GH, which at this point in my career isn't that much.
And if I would lose that (probably won't) rebuilding it is probably better anyway.
My most recent gripe with saves is FF IX on Steam. It has a hidden automatic save + continue function. It's not saving that often, so if you press continue when starting, you may start way before your manual save. 🤯
I spent over 5 hours doing the first version of this picture on a Mac, about 15 years ago. I lost everything when Illustrator crashed and apparently the scratch discs were full so there was no recovery file.
Took me a little while to emotionally recover from that one.
That's how I ended up using #GitAnnex + 3-2-1 rule for non-coding files. Backups are good, but with git-annex, it's another level - you can not only distribute your files between storages, but also you can sync file moves, and more.
My uni used a virtual workstation setup on all the library computers. What they didnt mention was that everytime you logged in, it would randomly assign you one of the vms. So you would save your work to your documents folder, just for it to disappear next login. Real tears at finals time
Lost most of my Xbox 360 saves because they were on a flash dive that corrupted. Don’t remember what caused it. This was before cloud saves was a feature on 360.
As a receptionist/Secretary for a sales office,I was told by IT my files were automatically saved when I did my backup. I was checking it and saw all my folders there. One for each sales man. Computer crashed and each folder for the salesmen were there. But no sub folders - all my work! Gone. 😳🤦♀️
once had an 80 page paper in college where I had it on a USB stick on my keychain, and on the cloud. I vividly remember pumping gas and something on the usb caught my pocket, split open, and the internals spiraled through the air into a puddle of oil. Got home to find the cloud file also corrupted
So worst my "happened to me": before there was Google Drive/dropbox, et al, I constantly 'ctrl-s'ed. I also had v4final, v4a.sent etc AND believed I was unlucky with tech, so had 3 backups. File, HDD1, ext hdd2, ext hdd3. I had the great luck that all my WD drives died in succession within 2 days🤦🏽♀️
Lost so many homework files as a kid because of power outages and forgetting to save. Now I Ctrl-S all. the. time. and have everything backed up to 2 clouds.
Uni, last night before handing in project. Finished, and started moving files at the same time I was doing another file operation.
Tough lesson to learn...
Yes. Lost files on 320K, 1.2M and ZIP diskettes, 20MB, 40MB, 250MB, 500MB, 3TB HDDs, countless USB sticks, CDR and DVDRs. And the cloud. Yes, I am also old. The older you are, the more mediums to lose data. I think I also lost some data in enumerating the mediums.
I’m on you team. Although I’m more inclined to view this more as a generational / “legacy” issue?
People that have always used cloud-version Apps (either Microsoft/Google), I don’t think they relate to this pain that much (they might not even know what a file is)
There are a few years of my childhood where there are no photos of me. An external hard drive decided to pack up.
I've not yet had a disaster but I'm still dependent on one site (my house) being totally fine for some of my data. Looking into a solution this year for the family.
When anyone says OneDrive or Google Drive is their backup, I like to point out the time IBM deleted a cloud account and even the backups went away. Because of that, we have "off-site backup" for our Azure subscription by pushing a backup to another account at another provider.
People need to fail early so they don't loose big later. Learn the pain of having to recreate your school project at 3am so that when you're 35 your company does go belly up because your critical files were on a single drive that craps out.
one of my first file losses was because i tried my own in-place compression tool on its own source code. it reduced the whole source code into a single byte. and that byte’s value was 255. great compression rate but no way to decompress. :) it was a rich learning experience at 16.
A college friend asked for help with a damaged file in the late 80’s. Turns out they were keeping their 5 1/4” floppy stuck to their refrigerator with a magnet!
All of my projects, papers, and source code from college were lost on a Zip disk that had click of death. I had an x86 assembly version of Tetris I was really proud of and some papers that are gone forever. Everything now on 2 or 3 clouds.
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Sometime in the mid 00s the hard drive failed and corrupted all of my files.
I still think about that every time I crave my own personal nostalgia.
I've lost HD's too big to backup
work stuff always gets commited and pushed multiple times throughout the day.
Private stuff is on multiple hard drives and in the cloud, plus emails are on two phones, one desktop and on a hosted server. So far, that's enough. Nothing fancy.
That was ruff. It had the pictures and video of my daughter's birth on it. The SD in the camera already deleted. Luckily, I was able to restore most of it. Spend a night on that one.
It's been over 10 years and I'm still hurting from time to time over that one.
My most recent gripe with saves is FF IX on Steam. It has a hidden automatic save + continue function. It's not saving that often, so if you press continue when starting, you may start way before your manual save. 🤯
Took me a little while to emotionally recover from that one.
It worked if you remembered to press record when you started the backup.
One customer borrowed the cables and never returned them. No error message. No backups.
Sure, it’s funny now.
Tough lesson to learn...
People that have always used cloud-version Apps (either Microsoft/Google), I don’t think they relate to this pain that much (they might not even know what a file is)
I've not yet had a disaster but I'm still dependent on one site (my house) being totally fine for some of my data. Looking into a solution this year for the family.
I couldn't explain that to myself. I have used that pattern thousand of times before. It was that obvious that I didn't write the pattern anywhere ...
I lost all photos that I had on that Nokia N9. 🤦🏻♂️