Hi,
I guess my worst disaster was on Saturday, May 5, 2007. I was running
Windows 98 SE, and preparing to make a backup. I had this handy little
batch file to nuke some temporary stuff (IE temp files, etc) which I'd
already run once. I don't recall exactly how this batch file worked, but
as you'll quickly see, it was designed with the intent that only I'd run
it, and I'd know what I was doing, and wouldn't run it twice, etc.
Just before I started the backup, I decided to run that little batch
file one more time, just to make sure everything was ready. The first
hint that all was not well was when I received a sharing violation
error. Oh well, just ignore it. Then I noticed that my little batch file
was taking way too long. I hit Ctrl+C to abort, then started to survey
the damage. Over 8,000 files were now deleted, including my entire batch
files directory.
Luckily, most of the stuff was contained in a prior backup, and I was
able to use recovery software to get the rest back. However, to this
day, there are still files which have a May 5, 2007 timestamp, since the
recovery program didn't preserve the original timestamps.
In another unbelievable stroke of good luck, the filesystem on that
drive was FAT32, so the root directory wasn't sorted in alphabetical
order by default. As a consequence, some newer folders containing work
that hadn't been backed up were left untouched.
Jayson
On 3/11/2021 10:47 AM, Jean-Claude Provost wrote:
Oh, about 35 years ago (in the DOS days), I had written a stupidly simple
batch file called kd.bat (kd for kill directory. The idea was that, of
course, I knew what I was doing & it would kill the current directory where I
happened to be in when issuing the command. Back then, saving keystrokes was
of the essence, & I took great pride in my genious idea... I was saying to
myself ( to others), yeah, I'm blind, I always take more time than others to
acquaint myself with new programs but, I have my revenge when using
environments I'm familiar with... My lightning speed typing & the use of
clever batchfiles compensates for that I concluded.
until, one day, about 2 years after my great bragging achievement, not sure
why, I entered that command when I was..... in c:\...
It was not funny😊 Harddrives were not that fast back then, & I could hear it
wirring as I was wondering how come the operation was taking so much time...
& then, the prompt came on my display... c:\.
I did not re-create that batch file😊
Cheers,
Jean-Claude Provost
-----Original Message-----
From: raspberry-vi-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <raspberry-vi-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
On Behalf Of Ken Perry
Sent: Thursday, March 11, 2021 9:43 AM
To: raspberry-vi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [raspberry-vi] Re: Tough lesson
Wow! I am sure we all have at least one nasty story like that. I lost 800
meg once which included all my banking information for 10 years. That was
back in the unstable days of Linux though and while it wasn't rm it was
something just as bad. Glad to hear you were able to recover even if you had
to come at it sideways.
-----Original Message-----
From: raspberry-vi-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <raspberry-vi-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
On Behalf Of Michael A Ray (Redacted sender "mike.ray" for DMARC)
Sent: Thursday, March 11, 2021 9:05 AM
To: raspberry-vi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [raspberry-vi] Tough lesson
Hello,
You would think that after over thirty years of being involved with computers
professionally, and after 25 years of using Linux, I would have learned that
if I was regularly in the habit of typing:
rm *~
In a directory to get rid of nano backup files, then it is inevitable I would
one day type:
rm *
Thus it was that yesterday morning I deleted all the original source of all
blog posts for raspberryvi.org.
Never mind...
I have written a Python script and library that scrapes the articles from
online at raspberryvi.org using BeautifulSoup and re-creates the original
markdown.
Just a little checking is all that is needed to make sure each article is as
it was before.
I usually use git to initialize a git repository in any tree I am working in,
but had neglected to do so for raspberryvi.org.
Tough lesson. But hey, it was fun writing the Python scraping code.
Mike
--
Michael A. Ray
Analyst/Programmer
Witley, Surrey, South-east UK
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when
there is nothing left to take away." -- A. de Saint-Exupery
https://cromarty.github.io/
http://eyesfreelinux.ninja/
http://www.raspberryvi.org/
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Archives: //www.freelists.org/archives/raspberry-vi
Administrative contact: <mike.ray@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
-----------------------------------------------------------
Raspberry Pi and the Raspberry Pi logo are trademarks of the Raspberry Pi
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This list is not affiliated to the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the views and
attitudes expressed by the subscribers to this list do not reflect those of
the Foundation.
Mike Ray, list creator, January 2013
===========================================================
The raspberry-vi mailing list
Archives: //www.freelists.org/archives/raspberry-vi
Administrative contact: <mike.ray@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
-----------------------------------------------------------
Raspberry Pi and the Raspberry Pi logo are trademarks of the Raspberry Pi
Foundation.
This list is not affiliated to the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the views and
attitudes expressed by the subscribers to this list do not reflect those of
the Foundation.
Mike Ray, list creator, January 2013
