Tuesday 31 Oct 2023

Happy Hallowe'en

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Happy Hallowe’en! It’s that time of year again, where there are vampires and miscellaneous undead out and about.

Given I write at lot - probably too much - about data backup, I will discuss a few data loss stories I have gathered from the net.

But first, a friend of mine had a data loss incident. She had a phone but was not backing it up. After about 100 GB of photos later, the phone was dropped breaking the screen. She attempted various recovery options and I understand she took it to a repair shop to work on it, but to no avail – the photos were in fact lost. Back up your phones. You are spoiled for choice!

The classic horror sound of the "click of dead" causing missaery to all: Your hard drive has failed. I suspect that over the years many hundred of thousands of TB have been lost. Hard drives will die, so keep a backup.

Reddit is full of such tails. Sometimes the data is so close but not reachable: A Redditor had 6 TB of data encrypted on their home server. Due to a fright, they forgot the passphrase resulting in no access to their data; they report that they annually boot it up their PC and try different passphrases. Another examples come from the use of phones: If you take pictures you must back them up. One Redditor accidentality deleted a thousand photos and could not recover from the phone. Had they had a back-up, they could have easily restored.

A spooky story came from YouTube: Acts of God destroys data. A lightening strike struck the house resulting in surges travelling through electrical and Cat5e cable. Not only was the primary PC and attached backup drive was destroyed, so was the network attached server.

To fight all these horrors the 3:2:1 rule comes to the rescue.

Happy Hallowe’en every one!