One of our helpdesk guys used to work for Pissy Werld
When cloning someones hard drive before attempting to recover a University students years worth of Phd notes he ghosted a clean drive image over the students corrupt one. Nice effective way to end up with 2 empty hard drives, apparently.
( Airman Gabber Living life like a 70's BBC presenter, Tue 11 Sep 2012, 16:58, 9 replies)

Was their PhD in being a spastic who doesn't keep backups?

( BraynDedd Natasha Kaplinsky's labia majora, Tue 11 Sep 2012, 20:44, closed)

Some of the most intelligent, creative boffins I have had the pleasure in meeting simply have no IT skills whatsoever.
Simply asking them to change font size in word is enough for them to recoil in horror, but ask them for a new theory on *insert new theory here* which will be revered by thousands of academics across the world? Easy peasy.
( Tesco Quality 60.825659, -0.788337, Wed 12 Sep 2012, 0:33, closed)

There's really no excuse for this anymore though.
Back in the 90s when computers were still relatively new to workplaces, maybe, but nowadays my 3 year old can run Linux updates, for fuck's sake. Backups should be second nature to anyone working with computers.
( BraynDedd Natasha Kaplinsky's labia majora, Wed 12 Sep 2012, 11:47, closed)

What are his consultancy rates?

(CharminglyShallow incarcerated for a crime he probably did commit., Wed 12 Sep 2012, 11:54, closed)

I studied computer science.
And never really backed anything up; I knew I should, I just never bothered.

My approach to IT is a bit like the fable of the cobbler with the knackered shoes though.
( Slippery Mick ‏, Thu 13 Sep 2012, 1:13, closed)

I've done better than that.
In the olden days, I was admin for a Novell network. I was upgrading the main fileserver, and had to back up the system config. Novell uses a set of files called the 'bindery' files, which I suppose were roughly equivalent to the registry and used database on a Windows domain.

Anyway, I dutifully backed it up and set up the new server.

When I came to restore the bindery to the new server, I discovered I had actually restored a blank config to the original server, thus trashing the config.

In my defence, the two programs were stupidly named - bindfix for backing up, and bindrest for restoring it (if memory serves correctly, it was the best part of 20 years ago).

Took me 2 days to sort that little fuck up out.
(username failed moderation, Wed 12 Sep 2012, 9:15, closed)

I'm an ex Novell Engineer
I remember the pain and confusion of their command line and dodgy DOS apps to manage their servers. Back then this idea of a GUI based LAN was a pipe dream.

Aaahhh How i miss 80 floppy installs that had to be started from scratch if the driver didn't properly bind to one of the NE2000s.
( Airman Gabber Living life like a 70's BBC presenter, Wed 12 Sep 2012, 16:41, closed)

Frame types!
Took me several hours to realise that having 802.2 instead of 802.3 in the config files of over 50 PCs was why nothing whatsoever was appearing on the network.
(username failed moderation, Thu 13 Sep 2012, 8:59, closed)

VAX / VMS tale (because I'm THAT old)
VMS automatically kept old versions of any edited files. There was a command, purge, which deletes all these historical versions. VMS also allowed any command to be redefined, a fact which a support person became painfully aware of when, after running the purge command to make space for his task, he discovered that the customer had redefined this standard, commonly used command to mean "delete everything on the disc"...
(moon monkey is busy making memories worth repressing, Wed 12 Sep 2012, 9:55, closed)