Ask the Readers: Why do you do dumb things?

Ah.

Ask the Readers: Why do you do dumb things? - Lifehacker: Former Apple evangelist and Silicon Valley bigwig Guy Kawasaki discusses how his Macbook's hard drive went kaput and why he, as an intelligent guy, had not backed up his important data.

Excuse me while I go back up all three of my hard disks.

Comments

[Stuart]

Sad to say this happened to me on an old PC a number of years ago. As a Network/Systems Administrator, I had a hard time explaining that one away. Since then I've setup a crude home file server (old full-tower PC) with a RAID5 array, and my wife and I store everything there, including the image files for our PC HDDs...just in case.

[Surveillance3942]

If you ever need it, we do nightly backups of your hard disks. I'm sure I could send you a disk image if you ask nicely.

[DILBERT DOGBERT]

Just got a Buffalo Terastation. I had the feeling that the 17,500 or so jpegs and a bunch of home videos were about to disapear. At work I had only one hard drive failure on the various Macs we used but more than I want to remember on the PCs at home.
Any smart guys reading this who can tell me how to migrate my saved mail files from Netscape 7.2 to Foxfire?

[Rich Gibson]

Stuart - A good friend, and reasonably significant member of the technical community, had a similar strategy. Lots and lots of storage in a RAID5, and it crashed in a particularly hideous way that caused him to lose everything.

[Stuart]

Rich - You're right, NOTHING is fool proof, and RAID5 is only good so long as you lose only 1 drive...it's the 2nd lost drive that's the killer. I've seen a RAID5 array lose 2 different drives within 3 days of each other. As long as you have a) a spare drive or two, and b) good active monitoring and notification in place, you're in pretty good shape. If the data is valuable enough, you spend the money on some kind of backup and keep an off-site copy.

[jerry]

Sigh,

I would not blame Guy Kawasaki. I would bet the CxOs of most companies are idiots just like Guy. The "smart" guys became engineers, physicists. The dumb guys became business majors and learned how to steal the smart guys work.

[John Emerson]

I'm more interested in the question, "Why can't the most arrogant people in the world design a robust computer?" (Sort of a Maytag or Toyota computer).

And second, why don't the arrogant weenies who spend so much money on computers ever complain about the bad product they get?

Would it, for example, be possible to put in a warning light telling you that your fan is failing and that the computer is starting to overheat? That seems to me as though it must have already been possible by about 1920, but I guess I don't know anything.

[wcw]

My "PC", an el-cheapo OEM motherboard in a cute little case with some middlin' components around, will shut down, period, if the fan fails. Or are you asking for sensors inside your fan that tell you before it fails, and just how much would you like your PC to cost? As for a Maytag PC, you can have Maytag-esque mean time between failures right now. The question is, again, at what cost, and more to the point, what's the point of a PC that lasts thirty years when it'll be obsolete in three?

If what you're really asking is, "hard drives! when I was a boy, we stored our data in notches on sticks, and we liked it!" I don't think I have a response.

[elliottg]

A deliberate and reasonable backup regime costs way more in time and money than dealing with the crisis when it happens. Backing up is like motherhood and apple pie, and it's important for large-scale enterprises where there are significant economies of scale, but for your personal files, it's not worth it. I have had 3 hard disk failures. Two of them happened on my personal PC and by booting off of a good second hard drive, I recovered everything. One was a total failure, but most of my important files were in email (on the server) or had been backed up by corporate.

Noone wants to admit that NOT backing up is a reasonable strategy for most, just like you don't tell your children that disobeying traffic laws or smoking pot is ok.

[John Emerson]

People are **always** complaining about crashes. I've been relatively lucky, in that I've lost hardware but not much data.

There's really a lot of reason to want a computer to be reliable for longer than it's up-to-date, if any data is stored on it. Not necessarily 30 years.

I always get the same answer. There's this fatalism about computers crashing that you don't have about any other high-tech question, and I always get these explanations why the problem is insoluble or not worth solving, or too expensive to solve. I don't understand it. Hardware is unsexy, I guess, so the can-do engineers don't bother with it.

And there's always this idea that I'm an idiot for thinking that we have a technical problem here, rather than some occult mystery or curse of God.

[BillCross]

wrt the fan outage thing a temperature sensor will run you a couple of bucks and connecting this sensor to a light will run another couple of bucks; so maybe 5 bucks extra and I too think this could have been done in 1920.

[andres]

If you keep it in hard disks, it crashes.
If you keep it in CD-ROMs or diskettes, they get lost.
If you keep it in books, they burn or fade.

Maybe cuneiform tablets aren't so obsolete after all ;-)

[John Emerson]

My own computer has no such sensors. I'm sure that they could be built in for much less than the price you gave.

I've been militating for awhile for a robust computer designed for people who don't want to get involved in their computer, but just want to be able to use it. So many computer users, computer techs, and computer designers are buffs who just love tinkering with the stupid things, that the demand for a computer which is good for the rest of us is sure to be met with hails of derisive laughter.

[kvenlander]

Is that Terastation the one with two 500 GB disks? If so, and you value your data, make sure you use RAID 1 (mirroring) not RAID 0 (striping). With RAID1 you have 500 GB space and if one disk fails, you'll still have your data. With RAID0, if one disk fails, you lose all of your terabyte of data.

If you run Windows, search for SyncToy on Microsoft.com. It'll synchronize folders between two disks (they can be across the network too). It can be scheduled, see Help.

[ahem]

RAID1 is not a backup solution. It is a hardware failure solution. The difference is important.

[yoyo]

I'm hardly a computer expert, but i have a program "DTemp" running on my computer that displays the temperature of my hard drives in the status bar thing at the lower right part of my screen. IF they get to hot (you can set what 'too hot' means), the numbers turn red. better than nothing.

[John Emerson]

Perhaps the temperature problem is only with computers I buy. Something like that should be standard issue, though.

[DILBERT DOGBERT]

My Terrastation has 4 250 hard drives and is set to the default raid 5. I have 3 other drives, two in the case and 1 firewired to the computer. The stuff I don't want to loose or to have to rescan from originals are copied on one or all three of these drives as well as on the terrastation. Belt and suspenders.

[Evan]

Temperature sensors, yeesh! There are *many* reasons why a hard drive can die or lose data.

The fundamental truth is that if your data lives on only one hard drive, it simply does not exist. Your songs, love letters, thesis, porn, addresses, they are all figments of your imagination. Every morning, when you recite your before-breakfast prayers, give thanks to God that He has seen fit to once again, stay His hand and not wipe your information from the universe.

P.S. - It is to my industry's eternal shame that we gleefully market our products to non-technical users without bothering to A) educate people about data loss and B) create dead-simple products that provide some reasonable level of protection from user errors and hardware failures. I guess there's no money in it.

[John Emerson]

"Create dead-simple products that provide some reasonable level of protection from user errors and hardware failures."

That's my point -- perhaps it's a planned obselescence thing. I would be willing to give up a lot of the bells and whistles in order to get a robust computer. And I really don't want to get involved with my computer, I just want to use it -- as I said, like a Toyota or Maytag. We seem to be in the British-sports-car era of computer history, and no one seems to be interested in getting out of it.

Whenever I raise these questions, besides having it explained to me what an idiot I am, I get all these reasons why improvement is impossible. I guess the computer got Gorgar has forbidden interference with his divine plan. There's no can-do spirit, that's for sure.

[John Emerson]

Correction: "Computer God, Gorgar,"

My favorite Toyota story was about the little old lady whose Toyota started acting up after three years and 100,000 miles.

The mechanic asked her, "How often do you change the oil?" She responded, "Are you supposed to change the oil?"

Computerwise, the L.O.L. is me. But my computer isn't a Toyota.

[AC Mitchell]

"We seem to be in the British-sports-car era of computer history, and no one seems to be interested in getting out of it"

You talk about the 'can-do' spirit, and in a way I think that comes down (inevitably) to the culture amongst those who have the most technical interest in these things. The 'new' is generally lauded over the 'stable' by those who could do anything about it; it's so ingrained at every level (from my own experience) that it's not seen as a 'problem' at all.

To answer the question, I do dumb things because I forget to do smart ones. This discussion reminds me I need to do some backing up, so I hope that's the most plausible explanation.

[John Emerson]

"The 'new' is generally lauded over the 'stable' by those who could do anything about it; it's so ingrained at every level (from my own experience) that it's not seen as a 'problem' at all."

An engineer once told that in engineering it's well-known that self-taught, unlicensed engineers build very, very stable, safe bridges. Whereas the Tacoma Narrows bridge that failed so spectacularly was a state-of-the-art, virtuoso production -- the longest span of its kind in the world.

Sort of a reminder that credential monopolies allow practitioners to escape accountability as long as they are credentialed and following established procedures.

http://www.enm.bris.ac.uk/research/nonlinear/tacoma/tacoma.html

[AP]

Please. Any twit can walk down to a Best Buy, pick up a box from Maxtor, plug in the USB cable, and hit the big freaking glowing blue button and get 100% redundancy of his or her data.

You can't do that for your washing machine.

That people don't take advantage of the cheap, easy, dead-simple options for as much security as you want to buy is a poor reason to condemn computer engineers everywhere.

(That said, I'm currently hoping that the $1,750 I'm shelling out to Hollywood Data Recovery gets me back the six-year-old laptop harddrive that has my doctoral dissertation's supporting data on it because the backups are all incomplete or pdfs.)

[John Emerson]

"That people don't take advantage of the cheap, easy, dead-simple options for as much security as you want to buy is a poor reason to condemn computer engineers everywhere".

Yes it is. And you're doing exactly what I've been talking about -- blaming the victim. What I've been saying is that passively robust computers, needing no additional patching, should be made available to people who want one to run like a Toyota or a Maytag and who do not want to get under the hood and do any tinkering at all.

All computer engineers everywhere can go fuck themselves. There!

[Maynard Handley]

"
I'm more interested in the question, "Why can't the most arrogant people in the world design a robust computer?" (Sort of a Maytag or Toyota computer).
"

Because it's a really really hard problem? Kind of like asking "how come the NIH, with all its' billions, still hasn't cured cancer".

---------------------------

"
deliberate and reasonable backup regime costs way more in time and money than dealing with the crisis when it happens. Backing up is like motherhood and apple pie, and it's important for large-scale enterprises where there are significant economies of scale, but for your personal files, it's not worth it.
"

Maybe if you're running a cretinous operating system like Windows where half the important files are invisible and you can't backup files that are currently open.
On a Mac (yes, yes) or Linux you write a wrapper script around rsync, set it to run via cron every night and you are done.
As an example I have a script running once an hour that backs up the most essential parts of my server (people's mail accounts and the blog and wiki databases). The last time I interacted with it was maybe a month ago.

[John Emerson]

Maynard, I don't think that a perfect solution can ever be reached, but I don't really think that the effort is being made. In most high-tech areas "Because it's a really hard problem" is an incentive to effort, but not in this one. Robustness is unsexy; gracility and fragility are Teh Hott.

It seems that someone could sit down, make a list of the ten most common causes of information loss (I've suffered only two -- a computer heating up because of a failed fan, and a lightning-strike power surge), and then work on them one at a time. It seems that by that method you could produce a much, much more robust computer -- though probably not a Maytag.

I really think that it's partly planned obscelescence and partly the "British sports car" mystique, where people brag not only about their car's performance but also about their own mechanic skills. High-tech people don't normally have a passive attitude toward technology and problems, except on this particular point.

[liberal]

John Emerson wrote, "I just want to use it -- as I said, like a Toyota or Maytag."

What happens to your Toyota if it starts leaking oil and you don't take it into the shop?

Does your Toyota last as long if you never change the oil?

What happens to your Toyota if a tire goes flat and you don't change it?

[liberal]

...oops. Didn't see your further post on changing oil...

[John Emerson]

You see, that was my point. Toyotas are designed to run with very minimal routine care. Even very smart, savvy computer often have computer disasters suddenly hit them.

[Cam]

Well, I've got a slightly different perspective. I frame my home data loss plans around "what would I do if the house burned to the ground". Backups need to be 1) offsite, and 2) free from user intervention. This makes it much more difficult. There are a myriad of affordable online backup providers - but who can afford to store 50 gig of photos there? My solution? Automated nightly backups of critical files go onto the internet. Photos get backed up across multiple drives/PCs, and periodically burned to DVD. The missing bit is the fact that I keep forgetting to take the DVDs offsite!

So far, I've lost hardware (another drive last week!) but no unreplacable files.