Epic tech fail... Double Facepalm is ENTIRELY Insufficient

[308Mike]

OUCH!!

I can understand how you feel, and I can pretty much GUARANTEE that Mel feels much worse than you do. I doubt there's anything you can do or say that could have more impact than what she's already doing to herself. I wouldn't be surprised if once she realized what happened and the extent to what occurred, she may have actually gotten physically ill. Just look at it as if you had lost it all in a fire.

I lost some irreplaceable photos on a drive that failed and I hadn't backed it up in about a year. So now I'm a little paranoid about my backups. I do a monthly backup of *just* my data files to a portable USB drive, and then I disconnect it and put it in the gun safe. If any of our machines start acting up, the backups on that machine become more frequent.

I don't worry about the OS or programs of which we have the installation disks - and the downloaded programs get backed up locally, so I don't have to go out and suck up all the bandwidth just to re-download them all over again, particularly device drivers. Passwords are backed up on paper and put in the safe.

[mekender]

One of the reasons I store my electronic documents in a couple of different cloud based storage sites.

[free_me]

One of the reasons I store my electronic documents in a couple of different cloud based storage sites.

I hope you also have local backups.

[mekender]

One of the reasons I store my electronic documents in a couple of different cloud based storage sites.

I hope you also have local backups.

You mean my backup drive or my backup server or my crashplan backups to the other desktop in my house?

[JustinR]

not recoverable. Partition tables were overwritten and then the drives were used for six weeks, including defragging.

completely gone.

Critical medical, legal, financial, tax records etc...

Many not recoverable.

Damn.

The HD on my laptop that I'd been using since 2004 gave up the ghost back in December. I'd been lax in my backups the last few years, but was able to recover probably 99% using VirtualLab Data Recovery, my old desktop, a laptop IDE adaptor, and a 64GB USB thumb drive despite the drive corruption.

But for a while...yea, I had that awful feeling of seeing a suddenly empty partition.

Hang in there.

[Greg]

One of the reasons I store my electronic documents in a couple of different cloud based storage sites.

I WAS doing that... then my internet connection changed from a reliable unmetered constant on, to a 4g wifi hotspot.

Yep, the downside of cloud-anything. Bandwidth isn't sufficiently ubiquitous yet. Yes, Nexus devices still need SD card slots, but oh well.

[Greg]

Yeah... I'm actually mostly running off off a wifi hotspot hack to my Droid Bionic handset. I'm one of those folks who have permanent true unlimited data on my verizon plan, but it's locked to this specific device. If I upgrade it, I lose the unlimited.

Do you get to keep your grandfathered unlimited data if you pay full retail on a new phone?

My actual 4g mifi is limited to 8gig a month... which is about how much bandwidth I use in about four days (I use something like 60gig a month in a normal month).

Wow. I might use a quarter of that. I tend to use around a GB/month on my phone, but I try to do the data intensive stuff at home on wifi.

[mekender]

My actual 4g mifi is limited to 8gig a month... which is about how much bandwidth I use in about four days (I use something like 60gig a month in a normal month).

Wow. I might use a quarter of that. I tend to use around a GB/month on my phone, but I try to do the data intensive stuff at home on wifi.

HA... I have a 350gb soft cap on my home ISP before they send me a nasty letter threatening to charge me extra... I get such a letter about every 4 months or so.

[Greg]

Wow. I might use a quarter of that. I tend to use around a GB/month on my phone, but I try to do the data intensive stuff at home on wifi.

HA... I have a 350gb soft cap on my home ISP before they send me a nasty letter threatening to charge me extra... I get such a letter about every 4 months or so.

You stream video 24/7, or are you running a p2p charity, or both? I really wouldn't want to be one of your neighbors, cable ISP here.

[Greg]

Do you get to keep your grandfathered unlimited data if you pay full retail on a new phone?

I'm not sure. I've not been able to get a definitive answer on that.

Ah, good luck. I've seen a lot of word of mouth online that forgoing the subsidy on a new phone is the only way to keep the unlimited data. Hope it works for you if you try it.

My actual 4g mifi is limited to 8gig a month... which is about how much bandwidth I use in about four days (I use something like 60gig a month in a normal month).

Wow. I might use a quarter of that. I tend to use around a GB/month on my phone, but I try to do the data intensive stuff at home on wifi.

I watch a lot of video, do a lot of voip calls, update software regularly etc...

Ah, I don't stream much video, am a light voip user, and I don't have need to download lots of multi-GB .iso's (one or two of those every few years is about it) for me it's just updates from the apt mirrors for two systems (one Debian, one Mint).