The wisdom of 1990s was that if you have one copy of data on your disk, you may as well have zero copies.

It became more pronounced in late 1990s when disks became more ubiquitous and the race for the lower price likely made them less reliable.

After that the idea of backing things up, no matter where they are recorded initially, feels very natural.

That's still the wisdom.

The 3-2-1 backup rule: keep at least 3 copies of your data on at least 2 storage media, and keep at least 1 copy offsite.

> The wisdom of 1990s was that if you have one copy of data on your disk, you may as well have zero copies.

Still true.

Along similar lines: If you haven't tested or dry-run your restore procedures, you may as well not have backups either.

That applies more for things like SQL databases and the like, more than personal files on disk. But yeah.... if you haven't tried to restore your database or other data repository from a backup file that you've squirreled away, then you effectively don't have a backup either.

I’d slightly amend the analogy into “an untested backup is akin to having a lottery ticket for your backups”. Maybe you win or maybe you don’t.

Old floppies are also like lottery tickets in that sense.

Once my family drove to visit my cousins. I brought a newly bought box of floppies just in case they had some interesting things to copy from... and forgot it in the car with summer heatwave outside. It was a very painful lesson, so many badblocks.

I didn't know the temperature mattered?

Otherwise with new floppies I always reformatted and checked for bad blocks first. Some of the series were very bad quality.

nah, some just melted. It was on the front seat with no shadow in Israeli +40C degrees heat.

This, and the click of death coming from a Zip disk that meant 100MB of Something Important had just entered Valhalla.

Especially post-pandemic when most of the stuff in the theater is dead and there's only a single backup of the lighting board programming on a 3.5" floppy with a broken dust protector. Manually spinning it and blowing the dust out brought it back enough to save it after our first improv jam that took place with fluorescents on for the first 15 minutes while I manually programmed a single wash on a dimmer.

ddrescue trying to read a scratched DVD from a public library comes close. Horrifying sounds as you contemplate your drive wearing itself down, copy progress ETA 47:32:13

The secret for scratched CDs/DVDs I learned way too late in the game was that you can actually polish the clear plastic underside with Brasso (brass polish) and a lens cloth. I restored sooo many optical discs this way. It really works!

At that moment, I took the knife next to the computer to insert gently the blade into the drive above the diskette. It worked most of the time :p.

Glad to hear I'm not the only one who routinely stabbed my computer! I used to keep a butter knife by my iMac to help eject CDs. I had the first slot-loading model and the rubber eject rollers they used seemed to lose their grip after a while.

Especially when you're on floppy #25 of OS/2 Warp.

I recall installing Office from ~35 floppy discs, and finding that one of the discs in the 20s was unreadable after what felt like an eternity. The installation still completed after I skipped it though, so presumably it only contained some optional feature I never ended up using.

A friend of mine had his first job installing Oracle from floppies. I'm not sure what the actual count was, but we would joke about him installing disk 1 of 99...

First job I had was installing SCO off tapes and that was the year 2000

Thanks, that brought back a vivid memory I didn't even know was still knocking around my brain!

Or floppy #10 of Mark of the Unicorn’s DAW.

Nervous times they were!

Yeah, that, "Any second it will give up and shoot the disk back out" thought.

tik tik tik tik tik

That 'stutter-of-failure' :D

Abort, Retry, Fail?

With CP/M if you left the door open all your work was lost like tears in the rain.