Be Ye Not So Stupid

Scott Hardie | October 26, 2018
Learning a hard lesson not to do something dumb can hurt, but it's worse when you knew better and did something dumb anyway.

Two weeks ago, my computer needed some OS updates, which for complicated reasons I didn't think were a good idea, but I ran them anyway. The machine became bricked; it would power on but the OS (Linux) wouldn't start. I tried everything I could find online to no avail, so I hired a local technician to come over. He determined that the hard drive was blank (something I have confirmed does happen in this situation), and he said the restoration of the missing files would take over ten hours, so he took the hard drive with him and said he'd get back to me the next day to pick it up. That was a week ago. He has not responded to any of my calls or texts since then, to my considerable distress and anger. Unless I can finally reach him, that hard drive appears to be gone for good.

I have already ordered a (much more powerful) new computer, and I'll set it up when it arrives in a week or two. But it stings that my hard drive is gone. I didn't have any backups of my files! Making backups is one of many things that I've been meaning to do and know is important and just haven't gotten around to doing. So my advice to you is, BE YE NOT SO STUPID. Do not make my mistakes:

1) Have backups of all of your files, or at least the important and irreplaceable files. Use Dropbox or Google Drive or some other service to keep a copy of your files in the cloud that can be accessed on another machine. Do it this weekend! Do not put it off for later like I did.

2) Before running an OS update that you have any reason to think is iffy, make fresh backups of your files.

3) If you do damage the computer, ask for help from people you know. I have IT managers among my friends, and Linux administrators among my friendly coworkers, and any of them would have helped me if I had asked. But I didn't want to burden them, so I hired a professional.

4) If you're hiring a contractor, get a contract. If I had a written contract, I would have ways to force the guy to return the hard drive or compensate me for it. But we only had a verbal agreement, so if he wanted to, he could say he wasn't even at my house. (I never did pay him, since he said he'd accept payment upon giving me back the drive. I don't care about the money; I just want my files back.)

5) Finally, the most important but least specific lesson: Keep your focus. Stay sharp. Don't get soft. Don't get distracted. However you want to put it, I think that factor made a difference for me. I've been pulled in every direction lately, taking care of my ailing mother's finances and health, helping Kelly with chores and errands and doctor appointments while she nurses a bad shoulder injury, leading complex projects at work, organizing social clubs, planning a hugely complicated final challenge to end Gothic Earth, dealing with my own health problems via doctors and tests and pills, trying to budget our way out of debt (which just got worse with that expensive new computer), and more. Maybe it's all of those distractions, or maybe it's just getting older, but I find myself making careless mistakes lately that I can't imagine making in my younger years when I could better focus on what I was doing. I don't feel like I can give anything my full attention any more, and as a result, I let something bad happen to me.

Some of what I lost on the hard drive is replaceable: I had a local copy of Funeratic for coding and testing, which I can recreate on the new machine. I had numerous bash scripts I had written for carrying out complicated operations, and I can rewrite those. Wedding photos and other important photos can be reconstructed from what's on Facebook. I can retrieve/reset my usernames and passwords from various websites.

But some of what's gone cannot be replaced: I saved nearly all of the content from Funeratic's 22-year history on that machine, so there will never again be something like a recreation of how the site used to look, and I have no record of what was in defunct sections of the site like Pirate Paradise; it's gone forever. I lost lots of photos from childhood and high school and college that aren't online. I kept everything I'd written going back to junior high school in the late 1980s, like poems and short stories; my entire writing history is gone. Things I kept to remember deceased family members like recipes and photos are gone. Audio recordings of most of Gothic Earth's ten years of game sessions are gone. I had notes for I don't know how many games and projects and stories that are gone forever. I'm sure more will come up as I continue to think about it.

In the long term, Funeratic will be fine. I won't be able to look up historical data and content that isn't already online, but otherwise the site will be unaffected. But in the short term, it will be prohibitively difficult for me to edit the site until I have the new machine set up, a process that will take 2-4 weeks. That means I can't fix known bugs in the Shoot to Thrill tournament that are keeping me from launching more rounds of concerts until they're fixed. It means I can't process the new profile photos that people are uploading. It means I can't create new goo themes that I want to create. It means I can't add new content to The History of Funeratic in time for the site's anniversary tomorrow. It means I can't do more to block hackers, like the jerk last weekend who spawned 600 fake user accounts in 45 minutes. (I cleaned up the data and blocked him from accessing the site, but I can't yet close the loophole in code that he exploited in the first place.)

So the other thing I have to ask, besides BE YE NOT SO STUPID as I was, is for your patience. Funeratic will hopefully be back to normal soon. I'll keep you updated.

Scott Hardie | October 26, 2018
I got the title of this discussion from Heather Armstrong, who made her own mistakes.

Speaking of The History of Funeratic, here's as good a place as any to mention that I don't intend to keep writing ten items every year. The site isn't as active as it used to be, and (barring this hard-drive fiasco) there aren't many site-altering or real-life-impacting events happening lately, so continuing to write ten items would result in a pretty sharp dip in quality and relevance. Instead, I will write 1-10 entries each year going forward... starting with whenever the new machine is established.

In-joke time: For the last few years, I've had two old weak Dell laptops running Ubuntu, donated generously by a friend who no longer needed them. One was docked permanently on my desk at home and was my main stationary computer, so I called it Rocksteady. The other was just a travel machine running Chrome and lacking any other real programs, but it moved around the house with me, so I called it Bebop. After this incident, I'm through using old hardware that can't run games or play online videos, so I ordered a really powerful top-of-the-line desktop, and I think I have to name it Shredder.

Scott Hardie | November 3, 2018
I have reached the technician and I'm working with him to get back the contents of the drive (hooray!), but I don't have them just yet. It's going to be another two weeks, maybe three, until the new computer is shipped here and I can set it up, so most site updates are still in limbo until then. Even without the computer, I did manage to fix the bug that was holding up new "Shoot to Thrill" concerts, so I launched the two weeks' worth of them that we skipped over, and I'll launch another round tomorrow. Most other updates will still have to wait for now. :-(

Scott Hardie | November 10, 2018
My new computer finally arrived!

And it won't turn on.

Scott Hardie | November 11, 2018
The new computer is working, thanks to help from a friend. I am slowly downloading what files could be retrieved from the old drive; they're a jumbled mess of millions of renamed files, retaining only their extensions (for example, what used to be "kelly-scott-high-school-date.jpg" is now "F12378352954.jpg"). I don't have a local copy of Funeratic running yet, but I should have that next weekend, and I should be able to get back to running this site normally over the next 1-2 weeks. What a pain this whole situation has been.

Steve West | November 11, 2018
Life is a constant flow of lessons learned. New computer yay!!!

Lori Lancaster | November 17, 2018
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