[Gllug] [OT] Appreciation

[Jason Clifford]

On Wed, 20 Dec 2006, Pete Ryland wrote:

> That's exactly the point.  In the past, on poorly-protected home
> machines, it was all too common for friends of mine to call me after
> they'd contracted a virus that had busted their partition table, and
> most of the time they hadn't done any sort of backup at all.  Boot
> from a purpose-built floppy and normally you could have them sorted
> much quicker than a restore from backup would have taken, just by
> searching for the right magic numbers.  One friend, though, had an
> encrypted fs on his Mac that had on it his life's work, a novel he'd
> spent years on, which he lost to a boot-sector virus and unfortunately
> none of us could restore it.  Even to this day, fifteen years on, I
> still don't think he's fully got over it.

I hope he did at least learn never to trust data that important to a 
system for which there is no reliable backup system in place.

For home users the problem is usually that it's a pain in the arse to 
manage backups so they don't. Online backup systems with decent facilities 
behind them are, I think, the answer to this now that broadband is almost 
ubiquitous. Of course this would require people to understand the 
difference between important data the mp3 collection they downloaded from 
whatever p2p network they are on.

Jason
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