[Thinkpad] Lost file problem W2K

[Michael Geary]

> From: mje at foxall.com.au
>      I get the feeling that the whole computer world has gone 
> away from file-recovery programs to some extent, and people 
> seem to think you just let the file go if you accidentally 
> delete it - and so I'm not sure if the need to avoid further 
> changes to the disk is as well-known now.

Backup, mate, backup. Back up and back up again. Offsite backup. Extra
backups. Beats file recovery any day.

A good friend of mine just lost *all* of his data. Why? He relied on a fancy
RAID mirroring system to protect himself against hard drive failure. So the
hard drives didn't fail, the RAID controller did. And trashed all his files.
No backup.

>      I suppose part of the reason for this move away from 
> such utilities is that multi-tasking operating systems like 
> Windows are more likely to write to the disk without your 
> being aware of it, and therefore file-recovery attempts are 
> significantly less likely to be successful.  Still, I would 
> have thought the practice of rigidly separating all software 
> and all data on different partitions should be an adequate 
> remedy against this.
>      On the computer I am now using, I have the operating 
> system and programs and configuration files, etc. on the C: 
> drive, and all my data files (including
> e-mail) on the D: drive, and I *hope* that the operating 
> system is absolutely incapable of writing to the D: drive 
> without my directly authorizing it.

Maybe it works that way in some alternate universe. :-)

Here's how it works in our version of reality:

It's an operating system. It runs applications. The OS and the apps can do
whatever they darn well please. Every application runs as *you*, with all of
your privileges. The OS has even more privileges than you do: It can write
to any disk, any partition, any time. It can write to places you can't even
see. That's what operating systems do.

Backup. Did I mention backup? :-)

-Mike