Re: Data Storage and File Management

[Dan Brinegar <vr2link -at- VR2LINK -dot- COM>]

On  Mon, 5 Apr 1999, Eric Ray <ejray -at- RAYCOMM -dot- COM> wrote:

>At 11:50 AM 4/1/99 -0500, George F. Hayhoe wrote:
>>especially Elna Tymes and Mike Uhl, have said. This thread
>>is more relevant to our field than to almost any other I can
>
>Absolutely. Let me point out that .... everything else go out the
>window if the source documents are lost. Even if you have
>completely current hardcopy, you're still looking at
>an incredible amount of time and possibility to introduce
>mistakes to documents before your hardcopy docs become
>usable softcopy again.

Please allow me to offer a big, fat, "Me Too!" to Eric's points.... I used
to be really smug about the fact that I'd never lost data on my platform of
choice.... Trying to recycle a small hard drive, I managed to get
*EVERYTHING* I'd written over the last ten years gathered up on another
drive -- which drive failed spectacularly (darn thing was only five years
old!), taking with it *EVERYTHING* I'd written over the last ten years --
including my first formatted document, research papers, poems, stories,
loveletters, *and* the client-du-jour's major foot-in-the-door project.

Client bought a CD burner for the project.... I got to keep it (in lieu of
about half my fee)... and go to bed after three days. Daddy got to buy a
new HD. I got to start all over on the client's project (*after* burning a
CD with all his source files *first*).

Everything else I had to recover off of floppies... most of 'em 400k Mac
512KE formatted floppies.... floppies don't normally live a year, let alone
five or ten.

Just a few months after going through the same thing with Professor
Balderdash's MacWrite/WordStar files at the previous job when he got his
new computer....

*<shudder>*

Now, the thing to make sure of is that "Fred," or whatever your IS guy's
name is; knows how to do proper backups, and that the procedure for using
and backing up on the network, and the network itself is useable.  If you
do all the "Fred" jobs, make sure you've got it right 8-)


FWIW

-------------------------------------------------------------
Dan Brinegar   Information Developer/Research Droid

"Leveraging Institutional Memory through Contextual
Digital Asymptotic Approximations of Application Processes suited to
utilization by Information-Constrained, Self-Actualizing
Non-Technologists."

vr2link "at" vr2link.com   CCDB Vr2Link
http://www.vr2link.com     Performance S u p p o r t Svcs.

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