Data loss

11 Comments

Damn.

Mary Anne lost all her data in a hard drive crash. So I decided it was long past time for me to do a full backup of all my important files.

So I tried to, but I did some things wrong, so I tried to delete all the files that had copied over so far and start again.

And I thought as I was doing it, "Boy, I better make sure I'm deleting the files on the backup disk, and not the originals."

And I checked, and sure enough I was deleting the files on the backup disk.

Only I wasn't.

Damn it.

I don't think I lost too much, 'cause of the particular way I was deleting them. But boy was that stupid. I have nobody to blame but myself.

And of course my last backup was a couple of months ago....

Sigh.

Moral 1: Do regular backups. Moral 2: Do them intelligently, and don't delete files of any kind just before or during a backup. Moral 3: Never never use \rm if you can delete the files just as easily from the Desktop. (Thank God I know better than to use \rm -r.)

11 Responses to “Data loss”

  1. Jed

    On the plus side, although I came very very close to completely wiping out all of my data, I stopped just short of typing the command that would’ve done that. Luckily for me, I have a very deep folder hierarchy, and almost all the important stuff is buried several levels deep; I was deleting stuf one folder level at a time, and I stopped before I got to the level where all my documents are. I am very very very thankful about this.

    The only things I lost that I care about (as far as I can tell so far) are a few short movies I’ve taken with my digital camera in the past couple months (not a big deal), and my last couple of SWAPA ‘zines (which still exist on paper).

    But boy was I stupid. Memo to self: next time you make a backup, don’t be stupid.

    reply

  2. Jed

    …Oh, yes, and two and a half months’ worth of financial data in Quicken. Fuck. …But maybe I can recover some or all of that from Pocket Quicken on the Palm, not sure.

    reply

  3. M. Hogarth

    I recommend the use of those little USB thumb drives, if you haven’t seen them yet. I find that putting things on them that I want to work on became ‘putting everything I’ve ever worked on’, to the point where it’s basically a mobile back-up. Very handy!

    reply

  4. Jed

    Sadly, the little USB drives I’ve seen have all been such small capacity that they didn’t seem worthwhile to me. (I should note that my home folder contains about 30GB worth of data at this point, only half of which is music.)

    At some point, as they get smaller in physical size and larger in capacity, I’ll get a next-gen iPod and store all my data on it as well as all my music. But that’s a ways off.

    reply

  5. Susan

    See, so what I’ve been doing in terms of backups is just copying my Desktop and Documents folders on to a CD and burning that. I do it every couple of weeks, and I figure that if I lose the whole hard drive I’ll have all of the important data and just not the application settings and whatnot. Is this a particularly naive or unsophisticated way to do it? Because I don’t at this point know why I’d be needing to mess around with Unix commands to make backups.

    reply

  6. SarahP

    Susan, that’s what I do, too, and so far so good. *Is* it a naive an unsophisticated way to go about making backups?

    reply

  7. Will

    I do the same (burning stuff onto CD), but more on the order of every couple months. I don’t burn the entire directories, either; I burn everything that was created or last modified since the last update. It’s probably a bad system; it seems like it takes less time and fewer CDs, but it’d probably be a real pain to restore….

    On the other hand, the bulk of what I’m backing up, space-wise, is my Photos directory, so if I stored those separately from my backups, maybe life would be easier and I could just copy the entire Documents and Desktop?

    reply

  8. Joe

    Jed, if those Quicken files were important, you might be able to recover them. I know that there are utilities you can use to recover deleted files, as long as the disk space hasn’t actually been used for something new yet. (Unless, of course, you shredded the documents instead of just deleting them, but it doesn’t sound like you did that.)

    Unfortunately, I don’t happen to actually know any of these utilities off the top of my head, but I know they exist.

    Also, if you intend to do this, you should try to use the computer as little as possible until you do, to minimize the likelihood that new data will be written to those blocks.

    reply

  9. Jed

    Re burning onto CD: yeah, that’s a perfectly good approach. If you have room on the CD, you might also include your Library folder (which contains not just app preferences but, in some cases, stuff like registration numbers) (though you may want to go in and move your browser caches to the trash before you do that, to save space)—and if you use iPhoto or iTunes, I strongly recommend backing up your Music and Pictures folders, even if separately from your Documents folder. (Note in particular that the iTunes Music Store won’t let you re-download music that you’ve purchased; it’s up to you to keep backups, and if you don’t, you’re out of luck.)

    Sadly, I can’t use CDs ’cause I’ve got too damn much data, even not counting music and images. I could use CDs for just the new and changed files, like Will, but it’s easier for me to just use my external hard drive.

    Details of what I was doing and why are below, but the short answer is: Most people shouldn’t be bothering with the UNIX command line for backups, and those who do use it wouldn’t usually be in a situation that would lead to stupid mistakes like the one I made.

    The nice thing about Retrospect (for example) is that it does various more sophisticated backup things—letting you automatically back up only the files that have changed since last backup, for example.

    The reason I was using the command line is that the new version of Retrospect, for Panther, isn’t due out for another couple weeks, so I was just copying my files over to another disk. Last time I did this, I started out using the drag-in-the-Finder method to copy files, and got some cryptic error dialog about how some of the files couldn’t be copied. And I wasn’t sure the modification dates and permissions were being copied correctly. And it was really really slow. So I did some research and found out about the “ditto -rsrcFork” command (available on the UNIX command line), which allows you to make an exact copy of an OS X directory structure. It worked very well last time; did exactly what I wanted.

    But this time, I didn’t do some of the setup work I meant to do ahead of time, so I stopped the process in the middle. And then instead of sensibly using the Finder to wipe out the files I’d just created on the external disk, I used rm, in the wrong directory. And I deleted several levels of hierarchy using rm */*. Which is a clunky way to go about things, but I got in the habit of doing it to be careful to avoid wiping out the wrong stuff, and in this case the clunkiness of my approach was what saved me from total disaster.

    reply

  10. Jed

    Re undeleting: yeah, it occurred to me after I’d recopied a bunch of my old backup files onto my disk that there are undelete utilities I could’ve used. I didn’t think at the time that they would work on files that I’d used rm on (rather than Finder-style deletion); now it occurs to me that rm just unlinks the file (right?), so it’s probably even easier to recover such files with the right utilities. Sigh.

    At any rate, by the time I thought of it I’d already done a lot of new disk activity. I ended up restoring the missing Quicken data through a combination of downloading data files from my financial institutions and copying by hand from my Palm (it turns out Pocket Quicken can’t automatically restore a lost desktop-Quicken data file, grrr). It went pretty smoothly, though it did take a while.

    The only other semi-important thing I appear to have lost is my “music to buy” file, a long text file in which I keep notes about artists and songs and albums I may be interested in, mostly for use with the iTunes Music Store. I made a large number of changes to that file in the past ten weeks; all gone now. But c’est la vie; in terms of potential data loss, that’s about the least important of my semi-important files.

    So I’m pretty much up and running again; the only injury at this point is to my pride.

    reply

  11. Will

    the iTunes Music Store won’t let you re-download music that you’ve purchased

    Surely they at least let you repurchase the music? (The first several times this was mentioned, I interpreted it as saying Apple wouldn’t allow that, but now I think I must have been misreading it. Right?)

    reply

Join the Conversation

Click here to cancel reply.