5 ms·
And nothing makes your heart sink faster than the rhythmic sound of trying over and over to read the same bad disk.
by blamarvt 4y ago
And nothing makes your heart sink faster than the rhythmic sound of trying over and over to read the same bad disk.
- myth_drannon 4y agoOnce my family drove to visit my cousins. I brought a newly bought box of floppies just in case they had some interesting things to copy from... and forgot it in the car with summer heatwave outside. It was a very painful lesson, so many badblocks.
- bornfreddy 4y agoI didn't know the temperature mattered? Otherwise with new floppies I always reformatted and checked for bad blocks first. Some of the series were very bad quality.
- myth_drannon 4y agonah, some just melted. It was on the front seat with no shadow in Israeli +40C degrees heat.
- nine_k 4y agoThe wisdom of 1990s was that if you have one copy of data on your disk, you may as well have zero copies. It became more pronounced in late 1990s when disks became more ubiquitous and the race for the lower price likely made them less reliable. After that the idea of backing things up, no matter where they are recorded initially, feels very natural.
- Tijdreiziger 4y agoThat's still the wisdom. The 3-2-1 backup rule: keep at least 3 copies of your data on at least 2 storage media, and keep at least 1 copy offsite.
- vardump 4y ago> The wisdom of 1990s was that if you have one copy of data on your disk, you may as well have zero copies. Still true.
- daveslash 4y agoAlong similar lines: If you haven't tested or dry-run your restore procedures, you may as well not have backups either. That applies more for things like SQL databases and the like, more than personal files on disk. But yeah.... if you haven't tried to restore your database or other data repository from a backup file that you've squirreled away, then you effectively don't have a backup either.
- noizejoy 4y agoI’d slightly amend the analogy into “an untested backup is akin to having a lottery ticket for your backups”. Maybe you win or maybe you don’t. Old floppies are also like lottery tickets in that sense.
- flotzam 4y agoddrescue trying to read a scratched DVD from a public library comes close. Horrifying sounds as you contemplate your drive wearing itself down, copy progress ETA 47:32:13
- amatecha 4y agoThe secret for scratched CDs/DVDs I learned way too late in the game was that you can actually polish the clear plastic underside with Brasso (brass polish) and a lens cloth. I restored sooo many optical discs this way. It really works!
- JKCalhoun 4y agoYeah, that, "Any second it will give up and shoot the disk back out" thought.
- gildas 4y agoAt that moment, I took the knife next to the computer to insert gently the blade into the drive above the diskette. It worked most of the time :p.
- drewzero1 4y agoGlad to hear I'm not the only one who routinely stabbed my computer! I used to keep a butter knife by my iMac to help eject CDs. I had the first slot-loading model and the rubber eject rollers they used seemed to lose their grip after a while.
- thesuitonym 4y agotik tik tik tik tik
- JohnTHaller 4y agoEspecially post-pandemic when most of the stuff in the theater is dead and there's only a single backup of the lighting board programming on a 3.5" floppy with a broken dust protector. Manually spinning it and blowing the dust out brought it back enough to save it after our first improv jam that took place with fluorescents on for the first 15 minutes while I manually programmed a single wash on a dimmer.
- rawoke083600 4y agoThat 'stutter-of-failure' :D
- deltarholamda 4y agoThis, and the click of death coming from a Zip disk that meant 100MB of Something Important had just entered Valhalla.
- Centmo 4y agoEspecially when you're on floppy #25 of OS/2 Warp.
- forinti 4y agoA friend of mine had his first job installing Oracle from floppies. I'm not sure what the actual count was, but we would joke about him installing disk 1 of 99...
- bluedino 4y agoFirst job I had was installing SCO off tapes and that was the year 2000
- dugmartin 4y agoThanks, that brought back a vivid memory I didn't even know was still knocking around my brain!
- stordoff 4y agoI recall installing Office from ~35 floppy discs, and finding that one of the discs in the 20s was unreadable after what felt like an eternity. The installation still completed after I skipped it though, so presumably it only contained some optional feature I never ended up using.
- noizejoy 4y agoOr floppy #10 of Mark of the Unicorn’s DAW. Nervous times they were!
- throwaway742 4y agoAbort, Retry, Fail?
- Gibbon1 4y agoWith CP/M if you left the door open all your work was lost like tears in the rain.