Backing up C: to D: rofl

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SouthBit

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This post is merely for entertainment value.

My day job is within an IT department that supports a large institution. Last year we decided to ship all machines with the HDD split into 2 partitions, C: for the OS and apps, and D: for data storage.

Last week a colleague's HDD dies, but they think that their data is fine because they "backed it up to D:" and can't understand why they can't access it.

A new PC was delivered to another colleague yesterday and he is now 'backing up his documents on his C: to his D:'

Any they work in the IT department? The mind boggles...:confused:

Edit: They were informed by means of a colour printed leaflet of the new spec (partitioning) AND they are IT people.
 
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Depends if they were informed that is was only one partitioned drive or not. Most average users would not dive in to disk management to find out.

Well, judging by the number of posts here requesting data recovery services, at least they made some sort of effort to backup :)
 
Maybe I should include that they were informed of the drive being partitioned, and most importantly, these people are employed by my department...IT department. Sure if they were average users I would understand, but IT ppl ! :)
 
haha... that's quite funny.

I do backups to all my hdd's on my pc, but honestly I only feel safe when my data is on an external device disconnected from the power, and from my computer. Yes, I am paranoid, but it's not a bad thing in this case.
 
South_Bit said:
Any they work in the IT department? The mind boggles...:confused:
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Incompetent HR department hired idiots.

I've resigned myself to the fact that the majority of the people don't understand computers and never will regardless of how carefully it is explained to them. Sorta like some people just can't drive.

You know when FF has just installed an addon & after the FF restart it gives you a message box about something (addon specific). It only pops up once so not to annoying. The crew in the Tuks computer labs managed to image the PC before the restart though...so for close to a year 100s upon 100s of PCs were re-imaged with that every day. That gets old real fast. That being said, the computer labs crew does a decent job on the whole.
 
Scooby_Doo said:
Got to agree with killa, not as stupid as you think...
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killa?

Anyways, I currently have a 1TB HDD setup in the same format and I do the exact same backup as you are entertaining us with. There is method behind the madness.

What if a virus kills your windows partition somehow? It's happened before where I lost the entire partition and of course you can't get it back, so easiest thing to do it wipe it - although of course I am intelligent enough to boot into Ubuntu with a live CD and mount the partition to recover it all, but your average user might not know how to do that.
 
stroebs said:
killa?

Anyways, I currently have a 1TB HDD setup in the same format and I do the exact same backup as you are entertaining us with. There is method behind the madness.

What if a virus kills your windows partition somehow?
Click to expand...

Then they can bring it to us and we can get their data off by either just taking out the drive, or hooking it up to Ubuntu, recover the parition etc. You get the idea.

The entertaining point is that they think their data is safe even when their HDD dies. I agree with HavocXphere, HR hire people based on many apsects, unfortunately skillset is often not one of them.

Anyway as mentioned this is just for a laugh, not a debate on backups or user IQ :)
 
South_Bit said:
Anyway as mentioned this is just for a laugh, not a debate on backups or user IQ :)
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Lol, you shoulda locked the thread then.

And deleting a partition isn't a problem, data recovery is easy.

It's when the device actually becomes unreadable to the computer, that data recovery gets harder.
 
South_Bit said:
This post is merely for entertainment value.

My day job is within an IT department that supports a large institution. Last year we decided to ship all machines with the HDD split into 2 partitions, C: for the OS and apps, and D: for data storage.

Last week a colleague's HDD dies, but they think that their data is fine because they "backed it up to D:" and can't understand why they can't access it.

A new PC was delivered to another colleague yesterday and he is now 'backing up his documents on his C: to his D:'

Any they work in the IT department? The mind boggles...:confused:

Edit: They were informed by means of a colour printed leaflet of the new spec (partitioning) AND they are IT people.
Click to expand...

The fact that these are IT people boggles the mind. Speaks volumes of the calibre of people employed in the industry.

But on a side note I do this with my one mates laptop HDD and then 'backup' to the D: partition. This has saved his butt before where the drive developed lots of bad sectors (essentially unreadable, physical media failure) within the space where C: is, the D: partition was however was clean and a quick image with dd rescue got his data off the drive.

The above however will not work on a completely dead drive though but having multiple copies of the same data on a drive could ease data recovery if the drive is still accessible to some degree.
 
ponder said:
The fact that these are IT people boggles the mind. Speaks volumes of the calibre of people employed in the industry.

But on a side note I do this with my one mates laptop HDD and then 'backup' to the D: partition. This has saved his butt before where the drive developed lots of bad sectors (essentially unreadable, physical media failure) within the space where C: is, the D: partition was however was clean and a quick image with dd rescue got his data off the drive.

The above however will not work on a completely dead drive though but having multiple copies of the same data on a drive could ease data recovery if the drive is still accessible to some degree.
Click to expand...

Pretty much same experience I had, except the entire drive failed completely as I was copying the image of the unaffected data off. Hard drive basically slit its wrists and was bleeding out haha. Seagate SD15 :(
 
South_Bit said:
Really?
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Yip, I managed to format the wrong external drive a few years back and recovered about 90% of the data on it with some arb piece of software off the net. As he said it's only when the drive becomes unreadable to the computer that it becomes a problem, and you need to call in a data recovery specialist.
 
South_Bit said:
Really?
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Mike Hoxbig said:
Yip, I managed to format the wrong external drive a few years back and recovered about 90% of the data on it with some arb piece of software off the net. As he said it's only when the drive becomes unreadable to the computer that it becomes a problem, and you need to call in a data recovery specialist.
Click to expand...

I was being sarcastic with my "Really??" comment :) I have R60k worth of data recovery equipment and an honours degree in digital forensics, I was just being silly ;)
 
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ponder said:
What OS & imaging software were you using to create an image?
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For the life of me I cannot remember. I know it was a boot disk which I popped onto USB drive and moved it all over to an external HDD. could have been linux-based (Actually was most probably linux-based)
 
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