What Was Your Worst Computer Accident? 1542
Anonymous Writer writes "I learned years ago to backup regularly and never keep a drink on the same table as a laptop. I accidentally spilled a drink onto my laptop's keyboard where it drained into the laptop's innards, ruining the motherboard, CD-ROM, and hard drive. Thousands of dollars and all my data disappeared in a flash. Considering that there are even people out there that intentionally damage hardware, I was wondering what kind of disasters Slashdot readers have experienced."
A solution to almost all liquid problems (Score:3, Insightful)
The secret? Drink only water. I can do my computing without dependency on mind-altering drugs like caffeine and alcohol. And why pay for soda when water's free and doesn't expand your waistline or rot your teeth?
Being robbed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:mkswap (Score:1, Insightful)
instead of
mke2fs
D'oh!
Re:A solution to almost all liquid problems (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it tastes good?
Get Computer Insurance (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Honest (Score:5, Insightful)
A word of advice... (Score:5, Insightful)
While typing "rm -rf
If you're in the habit of typing the flags at the end (i.e. "rm
Re:The Worst. (Score:5, Insightful)
tar czf
find
will keep 30 days of full backups. Obviously, if depends on how much space you have, but an IDE disk is cheaper than recreating your work, and unless your work is video editing, your work shouldn't require much space to back up. If you want to get fancier, use incrementals to save space, keep indexes, etc, there's plenty of software out there.
But don't wait for the perfect solution! Start automated, periodic backups now! Drop whatever you are doing and just do it. Don't finish reading this slashdot story. Don't wait until you get something to eat or go to the bathroom. Your pants are less valuable than your data. Backups are not something you can afford to do whenever you get around to it, or to put off doing until you get it perfect.
Re:Get Computer Insurance (Score:3, Insightful)
No thanks. It's like trying to save money by playing at a casino--the house has already figured out all the odds, and they're not in your favor....
I mean, I could try to do the math: add up the costs of all the various possible accidents, multiply by likely annual frequency of each accident, then compare with the annual cost of insurance.
Or I could just remember that I know a lot of people who were as good or better than me at math who now have careers in the insurance business and access to much better data than me....
So, as an alternative, let me propose: always, always, self-insure! If your happiness or livelihood depend on having a $2000 laptop available to you at all times, then make sure you keep $2000 around in the bank. In adition to being much cheaper in the long run, this form of insurance is more convenient (no need for claims forms, just write the check!).
If you can't afford to save the replacement cost of your essential equipment, maybe it's worth considering whether you could afford it in the first place.
--J. Bruce Fields
Re:2 hard drives, one power supply (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:spilling acetone on a sony vaio laptop (Score:2, Insightful)
FOR THE LOVE OF FUCK (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:FOR THE LOVE OF FUCK (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Get Computer Insurance (Score:5, Insightful)
In most cases, the 10,000 loss will be worth precisely 66 and 2/3 times the 150 loss.... So the insurance is only worth it if your chances of a 10,000 loss are more than 1 in 66. (Well, actually we'd need to factor in the more likely smaller losses. But rest assured the insurance company *has* already done that.)
But you're right, we all have limited budgets, so for a sufficiently large risk it no longer becomes possible to amortize that risk in the way a large insurance company can. Weighing risks becomes more complicated as the magnitude of the risk approaches the magnitude of your savings.
If you didn't really *need* that equipment, then the hypothetical loss above probably really is only worth the $10000, and the simple cost-benefit analysis aboves says to skip the insurance.
But it could be more complicated: for example, if you lost the equipment and couldn't afford to replace it, and if your business depended on that equipment, then the actual impact of the loss would be more than the simple $1000 figure represents.
I'd certainly at least consider a smaller or less expensive car. But if the car is required, for example, to get to work, and if you can't afford to self-insure, then this is a case where insurance would make sense.
Sure. For a few big-ticket items (houses, medical care, in some cases cars), insurance makes sense even though you know it's likely to be a loss.
What I'm arguing is that insurance is a mistake for stuff like cameras; for all but a few professional photographers, it's just not going to make financial sense to spend so much on your camera that you couldn't afford to self-insure.
--Bruce Fields
Re:Honest (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Worst computer accident? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's just say that again: accidentally installed a boot loader.
But Win9X is the big accident, oh yes
Re:Honest (Score:4, Insightful)
Interesting thing about WinME (Score:2, Insightful)
By the way, they more than made up for it with Windows 2000 and XP, based on the NT kernel--I can't even imagine all these people here who still use Windows 98 in their minds to gauge Windows. Windows hasn't been the same beast since late 1999.
Re:Yeah that's why DOS was so great can't screw it (Score:4, Insightful)
the easy solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Pulling it out completely and putting it in another room is a good idea, of course, but IMHO, simply unplugging it will preclude the worst likely hazards, which are, of course, the power supply going apeshit, followed by your inadvertently erasing your HD. Plus, you won't forget where you put it if you leave it in the rack, but unplugged. Finally, you are much more likely to back it up at the scheduled time if you don't have to get up and get it, just plug it in and turn the key.
Of course, this precludes automatic backup, but I have a reminder program set to remind me to start backup 3x a week.
Supplement this with a DVD-R (well, tape if you like to live dangerously) backup set every month and send it somewhere far away you're comfortable about leaving all your data with.
This is, of course, an individual workstation solution, not an enterprise solution. :-)