Comment by dirkc

>> “There are two types of people: those who have suffered a catastrophic loss of data, and those who will.”

Also "There are just two types of equipment; those which are already broken and those which will be broken".

I've found a good way to point out anyone thinking right direction not to trust their valuable data in any single entity, product, location, etc.

When I heard it decades ago IIRC 80's Nokia Data Unix courses I went. The distinction made Backups is just 1/3 of the triad Redundancy, Backups, Archives.

1) Redundancy is what you get using RAID, multiple network connectivity etc. ie. good for avoiding single point of failures and avoiding loss service or product availability.

2) Backups are for recovering lost data needed returning lost running known state right before fault or some time state before what backup schedule and used rotation cycle can provide.

3) Archives are meant to saving valuable data not expected to change or active use and but there is need saving much longer periods.

Not seeing and understanding usefulness of difference between these seem hard some people I met over decades. Which then led to confusion, not knowing what they are up to with their data and also often later disappointment when they found out that for example backup programs are not great if you expected archiving instead.

I had a similar situation. As a kid I used to poke around on my families windows 3.1 PC and break it all the time.

One day I found an interesting new command called DriveSpace, and it looked exciting. I ran it on the C: drive and then got cold feet and cancelled the operation half way through. Needless to say this was a disk compression application, and I had just unknowingly compressed half my hard disk. Took a long time to figure that one out and I was in trouble with my Dad for bit, but we called a few experts we knew for advice and he included me along the journey to fix it. Something I always try to remember when my kids do something similar.

Reminds me of a story: I was sitting at a restaurant waiting for my food. I casually notice two young children in the next booth playing with a phone, but pay little attention.

Moments later their dad (presumably) comes back and asks for his phone back and sits down with their food. The kids are eating and the dad is fumbling with his phone with odd looks and I can see his frustration growing.

Then out I hear something like "What did you do to my phone?" repeated loudly over and over. "You erased my phone, it's gone."

The small children (guessing) had figured out how to factory reset his phone.

My thought at the time was something like : How many times did I do something as a toddler I don't remember to piss of my dad like that and that he never got mad or brought it up later (Lots of times knowing myself).

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