December 29, 2005

The importance of backup

A horror story for anyone who writes for a purpose:

When Linda Cerniglia went back to school, it took her almost seven years to get through all the prerequisites, the labs, the research. And it took a thief just moments to grab her purse, with the only copy of her master's thesis stored on a tiny jump drive inside.

[snip]

That night she couldn't sleep, tortured by visions of her lost jump drive. The next morning, Cerniglia began to think about what she would do if she were the thief. Get out of there fast, speed out on the Beltway, then dump the purse.

There was a chance, just a chance.

She was going to retrace his steps, go to every store he hit. She would talk to security guards, check lost-and-found, scour the parking lots.

So that day, she drove to Greenbelt, and as soon as she parked she saw a big trash bin behind a Wendy's, like a beacon. It was perfect. "It was open. It was hidden. I thought, 'That's it -- if it's going to be anywhere, it's going to be there.' "

She started pulling out broken-down boxes. She didn't care about the trash, even if it was greasy slop from a fast-food place. "No cockroach, no rat, no creature from the dark was going to keep me from my jump drive," she said. "Nothing is as bad as the thought of rewriting that thesis."

She saw a flash of aqua cloth. Her heart pounded -- it looked like her workout pants. "Then I see my gym bag. I jumped into the dumpster. I'm throwing things out of the way. I see my driver's license."

And there, at the bottom, was her black leather purse. She unzipped it, reached in, and felt her fingers close around -- her jump drive.

People driving by stared: A 5-foot-4 43-year-old woman jumping up and down in a trash bin, screaming.

I once took a course in International Business from the Dean of my college (Hawaii Pacific was a much smaller place in 1979). He had been a professor at UCLA and told a similar story: one of his grad students had stored the only copy of his thesis in a cardboard box on the back of his motorcycle, held in only by an elastic cord. The poor guy was driving along on one of the freeways and a gust of wind took the contents of the box and blew them to hell and gone all over four lanes of traffic. Dr. Papageorge told this story to make the obvious point: make copies of your work (this was pre-PC days; he was talking about carbons/photocopies, but the maxim holds). I wrote my 18-page paper for that class with a dime in my pocket for the copier, and as I completed each page I went over to the machine and deposited that dime.

(via Lawyers, Guns and Money)

Posted by Linkmeister at December 29, 2005 02:09 PM | TrackBack
Comments

Oh dear, I can totally see this happen to Insun -- what a horror story indeed (especially to the parents -- lol) :o)

HAPPY 2006, Steve :)

Jacques, Monique, Insun

Posted by: Monique at January 1, 2006 02:46 PM

When I wrote my dissertation (fancy word for Ph.D. thesis), I kept five copies around. Of course, those were 5.25" (real) floppies. One stayed with me all the time. One stayed at school. One stayed at home. I don't remember what I did with the others, but as the work progressed I became more compulsive about keeping the copies up-to-date. It was a personal nightmare that the work would be lost at the worst possible time--just at completion.

Posted by: ruminator at January 4, 2006 03:54 PM