I'm a geek who was born in the DOS generation and brought up on the command line goodness of tinkering with config.sys files to get programs to function. My first introduction to Windows came with 3.1, and up until this year that was my operating system of choice. Recently I threw myself headfirst into the Mac OSX experience by purchasing a beautiful 24" iMac, and I've been loving it since I bought it. However, last night was not the case, and I was ready to throw my piece of machine art into the fiery pits of hell.
As both a user and a systems administrator I have never, EVER lost a significant amount of data due to user error. I have been the victim of drive failures like many geeks out there, but even the damage there was minimized due to good backups. At home I don't have a lot of valuable data aside from music and old documents from school, and I've gotten so used to the idea of blowing away your OS every once in a while that data was always separated onto separate drives to make that easy. Needless to say, data loss is not something I deal with very regularly.
Last night, in an effort to actually have a backup system available, I installed a new NAS device on my network. My original plan was to use the NAS for Time Machine backups so that I could back up my desktop and eventual new Mac laptop, but unfortunately Time Machine doesn't recognize non-HFS drives. No matter - I decided to move over things that I would want access to on both my laptop - that means my music, comic book collection, and some archived files. I could then free up my USB drive on my laptop for Time Machine. Sounds like a great plan, right? Well, it was until... well, we'll get there.
So I'm copying files over to my old USB drive while this Time Machine hiccup occurs, so I stop the copy. For some reason my brain kicked over to Windows mode and said, "crap... was I copying the files or moving them?" I very rarely ever copied files in Windows - I always moved them from place to place. I was even the master of the right click drag when copying to different drives so it would move the files instead of copying. Regardless of that, I wasn't sure what Mac's default action was - move or copy. In an effort to maintain my data, I dragged the folder from my external drive back to it's original place. BAD IDEA.
Again, my brain went into Windows mode. As far as I know, I've seen every single Windows pop-up a million and a half times, and I can blaze through confirmations and warnings without a thought. I wound up doing the same thing last night, but the pop-up was a little different. The key word was "replace." Windows' default action in this scenario would be to overwrite any existing files and leave the rest intact. Well, Mr. Mac here decided that when I said to replace I was telling him to DELETE the entire directory and replace it with the one I was copying over. Needless to say my comic book collection went from 56GB to 2GB in about 30 seconds.
Once I realized my mistake I frantically scrambled to retrieve my lost data, but to no avail. Unfortunately the comic book files are in a CBR format (basically a ZIP file with a different extension) and Data Rescue II only found part of the collection. It was definitely my error (I should've understood what the OS was telling me), but I do find it funny that my first major data loss due to user error was on the "easy-to-use" operating system.
The moral of the story is this - Windows users are idiots. We think we know what we're doing, but in reality it's all smoke and mirrors :)
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6 comments:
I mourn your lost files for you.
I have only really suffered from data loss once due to a corrupt outlook express backup (when I was young and didn't know any better). I lost about 7 years worth of email. From that point on, I relied on Thunderbird, and then eventually Gmail as my mail client. I try to keep very little stored locally that I'm going to need to keep track of. I trust Google's harddrives (for docs, email and pictures) far more than I trust my own.
I hear ya on that. If Google exploded tomorrow I would pretty much lose everything.
As far as old emails - I actually delete most of them as they come in, even in Gmail. Only a few get the much valued "archive" button. I figured I don't need most of the crap.
BTW Nick... when are you starting P90X?
While I've always been a storage junkie it took losing the digital photos of my daughter's first few months to become backup addicted.
These days I have 3TB of storage online and another 1TB offline most of which is dedicated to backups and backups of backups. that doesn't even include the storage on my TiVos, AppleTV, game consoles or optical media. Hell I probably have data backed up on floppies that fit my 1541 floppy disk drives (a protein bar to the first person who can name what system those are for, without looking it up).
Irony here is your first significant loss was during your preparations to back everything up.
I won't be starting P90X until the beginning of October. Right now I'm focusing on a bit of a ramp up (dropping a few lbs) and training for a half marathon (I just ran 10km for the first time this past Sunday). The half is at the end of September, so I'm hoping that helps a little with my overall starting condition for P90X.
At the same time I'm so excited about it that I might have to give in and use a few of the videos early. I just ordered a vertical knee raise station off eBay (with built in pull-up bar), and I already have a set of 5-50 power blocks.
Good stuff... it looks like you're ready to go. When you get started let us know. If you're enough of a geek maybe you can post here with us :)
I made the same mistake once. I also learned the hard way never to move files…always copy and then delete.
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