3 ms·
Seriously, the magic of error correction is hardly appreciated or noted by younger hackers these days. I had one important project (I don‘t remember anymore wh
by endymi0n 5y ago
Seriously, the magic of error correction is hardly appreciated or noted by younger hackers these days.
I had one important project (I don‘t remember anymore which one it was), so I put it on THREE 3,5‘‘ disks, one after each other.
All three were unreadable by the time I arrived. I was devastated.
(note I had heard stories about rotating current brakes ruining disks so I took care not to go by rail, must have been something else)
- londons_explore 5y agoEither the drive you wrote the disks on, or the drive you used to read them, were misaligned. Putting the disks back in the original drive and they probably would have been readable.
- scsilver 5y agoAnd they computers don't have a sense of humor.
- bambax 5y agoNot exactly the same story, but there was this one time when I was working on a long document, several days work, on an Amstrad PPC 640 (this was the early 90s). Saving the file on a floppy took around 1 minute I think (maybe more) so I didn't do it often and had no copy or backup of any kind. It was around midnight, I was done and hit save. I had an external monitor, and for no particular reason, decided to move it around during the save. It was big and heavy, and while moving it I accidentally hit the power switch of the PC. Powering off the machine during disk write destroyed everything. I couldn't believe it, I stared at the machine for a while. Then I spent the rest of the night recreating the document from memory, while making frequent copies on different disks. It was a horrible moment that I remember vividly, but it taught me a valuable lesson. I never again lost any file for lack of appropriate backup.