I had a hard disk crash in early 1998 which lost me a load of software I'd written, including the most up-to-date sources of the program which later became PuTTY. Fortunately, I had an earlier copy of that stored elsewhere and resumed development from there; but the thing I was really cross about losing was the source to my Telnet answerphone program.
The idea of this was that since my computer at the time dual-booted between Linux and Windows, people might occasionally telnet into it in order to ytalk to me, only to find it was running Windows because I was playing a game. So I rigged up a small and simple telnetd for Windows, which gave the user the option to leave a message that would pop up on my screen in a dialog box. This turned out to be very useful, but I lost the source before getting round to fixing its many very annoying bugs.
Nowadays I wouldn't use such a program, because (a) I can now afford to buy one machine per OS instead of multi-booting, (b) nobody should be using telnet anyway these days and doing the same thing with a miniature sshd would be a lot more work, and (c) for people wanting to contact me remotely I have a telephone. But even so, there are traces in my SVN repository which betray the fact that I did once intend to get round to rewriting that program.
I started running backups a few years after that (after passing through a more ad-hoc phase of keeping really important data on more than one machine), but stopped again when hard disks grew by a factor of ten and tapes didn't. Last year I got some large USB hard disks and resumed backing up properly, and the improvement to my peace of mind is considerable.
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Date: 2007-01-25 03:27 pm (UTC)The idea of this was that since my computer at the time dual-booted between Linux and Windows, people might occasionally telnet into it in order to ytalk to me, only to find it was running Windows because I was playing a game. So I rigged up a small and simple telnetd for Windows, which gave the user the option to leave a message that would pop up on my screen in a dialog box. This turned out to be very useful, but I lost the source before getting round to fixing its many very annoying bugs.
Nowadays I wouldn't use such a program, because (a) I can now afford to buy one machine per OS instead of multi-booting, (b) nobody should be using telnet anyway these days and doing the same thing with a miniature sshd would be a lot more work, and (c) for people wanting to contact me remotely I have a telephone. But even so, there are traces in my SVN repository which betray the fact that I did once intend to get round to rewriting that program.
I started running backups a few years after that (after passing through a more ad-hoc phase of keeping really important data on more than one machine), but stopped again when hard disks grew by a factor of ten and tapes didn't. Last year I got some large USB hard disks and resumed backing up properly, and the improvement to my peace of mind is considerable.