Paul Schlyter wrote:
In article <l%Mli.111516$NV3.19072@pd7urf2no>, The Wizard of Oz <wizard@emeraldcity.gov> wrote:Paul Schlyter wrote:In article <00nli.108297$1i1.40973@pd7urf3no>, The Wizard of Oz <wizard@emeraldcity.gov> wrote:Anecdotally, I've had Microsoft Word (Office) crash and corrupt all the hard drives in a system (twice - losing a months worth of work in the process).Well, I suppose you got what you deserved, because when this happened, you had committed two cardinal "sins": 1. When that MS-Word crashed and did all that damage to your stuff, you were logged on to an account with administrator's right. If you instead had been logged on to an account with more limited user's access rights, that could never have happened. Only the folders to which you had write privileges could have been damaged by that fialing MS-Word, but never the entire hard disks.This was back in 2000. No administrator accounts.Windows NT had admin and user accounts before 2000 ....
Never said I was running an NT class of Windows.
2. You didn't back up your stuff properly - so you lost a months (sic!) worth of work instead of merely a few hours worth of work.It WAS backed up. To the second hard drive in the same system.:-) A really proper backup shouldn't just be stored outside your computer, but even in a different building! The building where you're working can catch fire.....
Correct. However you have to work with the constraints of what you have. If all you can afford is a second hard drive in the same machine then that's all you can do. It's a different story now though. Especially since people are scrapping fully functional machines just to run Vista.
There are btw hard drive recovery services one can buy, which can do really amazing things at recovering seemingly lost data. These people pick the hard drive apart, remove the magnetic disks, insert them in their own recovery apparatus and read the disks, one by one, as much as they can on every disk. They they put it all together to one big disk image, as complete as they can. These services aren't cheap of course, but can still be worthwhile in situations like the one you encountered, where one full month's of work was at stake.
$20,000 to start and they'll get the new drive back to the customer within a month. This is good if there is physical damage to the hard drive. In my case the physical mechanisms were fine (still work in fact). It was the content of the hard drives which got scrambled. The modern way to recover data (I've done this for countless friends running Windows) is to try to back up the files under another operating system. Then reformat the hard drive and put the files back. The other way to do this (assuming the modern method doesn't work) is to send the drive to a company associated with the CIA. They are able to recover data up to 13 previous reformats ago. Starting cost is $200,000.
My solution of scrapping Microsoft for everything but games works very well for me. YMMV. Of course there are those who believe the propaganda and will never consider the option.
Later Mike