QOTD: Have you ever suffered significant data loss? If so, what went wrong?

@mckinley@twtxt.net the best way to suffer no data loss is to not have data at all. 😂 I haven’t lost a single datum.

@mckinley@twtxt.net When typesetting our graduation newspaper (“Abizeitung” as we call it), I destroyed the work of a whole day. :-D

I plugged in the USB stick of my mate (exact same model as mine) to do a backup of that day’s work. Since mine was already plugged in, the mount path /media/USB_DISK or whatever it was already existed. Throughout the day I saved everything on my drive (I don’t know the reason for that anymore). The newly plugged in thumb drive then got automatically mounted by Konqueror as /media/USB_DISK2 or something like that. I wanted to show off my other mate how cool Linux was and how quickly the command line was able to get things done. By force of habit I cded into the wrong path to first rm -rf *, so that there was room for the new stuff. Indeed, the data was ruined super quickly.

When I noticed my fuckup I aborted immediately, but it was already too late. I went to the family computer to research recovery tools. All the files I was able to restore were corrupted. The Scribus XML files ended somewhere in the middle. So then we decided to redo all the work instead of wasting more time trying to fill in the missing XML. Unsurprisingly, it turned out that not only the last closing tags were missing, much more of the contents disappeared. I remember that I gladly noticed the second typesetting round went much faster. :-)

I could be totally wrong here, but I think one problem was that write operations to external devices were not immediately synced, one had to expicitly flush the write cache, e.g. by umounting it properly. Early on in the typesetting process we decided to have each page or spread as separate *.sla, because a) our computers were not powerful enough to handle a large project and b) once the layout template was cast in stone, we could easily work in parallel and join everything in the end. That helped to limit the damage to just my work. My mate’s was still there I believe.

Oh yeah, that’s certainly the best strategy, @bender@twtxt.net! ;-)