We can all relate to this. It either happened, or we’ve feared it happening:
Yesterday,
All those backups seemed a waste of play.
Now my chapters have all gone away.
Oh I believe in yesterday.I…pushed…something wrong
What it was I could not say.
Now my thesis is gone
and I long for yesterday-ay-ay-ay.Suddenly,
There’s not half the files there used to be,
And there’s a deadline hanging over me.
Office crashed so suddenly.Yesterday,
The need for back-ups seemed so far away.
I knew my thesis was all here to stay,
Now I believe in yesterday.
(attributed to Jerry Pournelle**)
-cvj
**Via Pragmatic Terror Systems of Discourse and Oxblog
October 7th, 2005 at 8:55 am
Clifford,
What a brilliant gem! While it perfectly captures the sense of loss and regret one feels after a crash, it doesn’t quite convey the concomitant rage toward the Evil Empire.
October 7th, 2005 at 9:11 am
I lost a bunch of my thesis and everything else on the hard drive. Fortunately I’d printed it out (it was just shy of the next backup) and I could retype it, and the rest was backed up. The only other thing I’ve ever lost permanently was some MATLAB code, that I hadn’t backed up because I only had MATLAB on that one machine anyhow. I that case I had the printed output, which was the important thing.
There’s never a good time for the HDD to die.
October 7th, 2005 at 9:39 am
While it certainly doesn’t save me from a hard drive crash (for that I back up regularly to my iPod), I happily got rid of Office for good back in the second year of my undergrad degree. Plain text editors like VIM are hard to crash, and LaTeX’s output looks better than Office’s any day!
October 7th, 2005 at 9:40 am
“In error, a key pressed
My life, for a whole week, gone
I start to type, again”
An interpretative haiku. Credit –> Me. It isn’t quite 5-7-5 format, but isn’t that why we have poetic license?
October 7th, 2005 at 10:17 am
into the aether
five hundred pages of work
screw you delete key
October 7th, 2005 at 8:29 pm
Ever typed
del *.for;
on a VMS machine by mistake???
Seems like alot of keys to type by mistake, I know, but it only takes one *wrong* key. Ah – the follies of my younger days….