This is the story of the most spectacular data recovery operation I’ve been involved with at Data West.  It happened in 1978.  The details are fuzzy, and I may not understand what actually happened, but somehow the drive device had slowly and routinely overheated for a while and the drive heads had written to a slightly different place than they should have.  The device finally failed, and after it was repaired, I discovered that none of the backup platters could be read, since they had been written to incorrectly.  The client had lost all their data. It still boggles my mind that we figured this one out. The hardware repair person and I noticed that we could put a platter on the drive and it could be read for just a few seconds before reading failed.  We tried powering down and cooling off the platter and then starting up the drive and reading it correctly again, but it didn’t work long enough to help.  I figured out that I could copy a few kilobytes at a time from the platter, but it would have taken weeks to do that, with no guarantee that the technique would work consistently enough.  So we got the bright idea of putting the platter in the client’s refrigerator-freezer for a few minutes and we could speed up the time between insertions of the platter and could lengthen the time before failure of the platter to read.  Instead of weeks, we were able to restore all the backup platters over several hours, and we literally saved the day. Lessons Learned:

1. Hardware is WAY more frustrating to deal with than software.
2. Always keep your cool when you’re working with a client’s data!

Thankfully, those early disk drives were replaced with much more reliable ones in the 1980’s and it became much easier to work with backups. This concludes the c’mon back chronicles.  If you liked this type of information, let us know and we’ll continue the series.

The following are just a smattering of the really creative things our clients managed to do with fixed/removable minicomputer drive devices of the 1970’s and 1980’s:

1. The cat (from the previous blog entry) was very happy atop the drive device until the heads crashed due to a massive amount of hair in the removable drive.  Needless to say, kitty found another place to sleep after the repair, and there was a good backup.
2. One user did not realize that the removable platters (at $150 a pop), in addition to being good magnetic media, could also be RE-USED after newer backups were made.  Imagine the chagrin of walking into a server room filled with shelves full of platters that had been used once.
3. After a head crash, one user very conscientiously attempted to restore from multiple GOOD backup platters and succeeded in crashing every one of them.  Fortunately, the fixed platter had not crashed, so the data was still accessible after repairing the drive unit.
4. I often had to travel to a client site carrying a removable platter in a case so that I could install our software on their system.  Fortunately, none of these platters ever caused a problem onsite, which was my constant fear.  However, one day I did arrive to discover that the client had scheduled me, an air conditioning repair person and a computer repair person to work on the same day, in a 5’ x 8’ room.  The air conditioner was installed directly over the printer and was leaking (hence the printer repair).  The room was so stuffed with cables that there was no place to put your feet.  Needless to say, it was not the most relaxing day I ever spent, but we all got our work done.

Lessons Learned:

• It was really hard to explain electronic media 35 years ago.
• Cats and computers don’t mix, except on You Tube.

The final ‘removable drive’ story took place in 1978.  It appears in its entirety in the next blog and is thankfully the most elaborate data recovery scenario ever attempted by this author.

Dear reader: Having bared all in previous blogs, it’s time to move on. As you may expect, the most interesting backup and restore experiences have been provided by our clients over these many years. Of course, the names have been changed to protect the guilty, since no one is innocent.

In the early days before personal computers, there were minicomputers. They often came equipped with large, noisy and troublesome disk drive units as peripheral devices. Drive units could store anywhere from 2 to 80 megabytes of data! They held one or more fixed disk ‘platters’ inside and one removable platter that could be used for recording backups. The theory was that you would regularly make copies of your data onto the removable platters and then remove and store them in a safe place so that you could use them to restore your data if anything went wrong. Interesting

Fact: More than once at a client site, I discovered a cat sleeping on a drive unit, since they radiated heat. The removable platters, unlike the fixed platters, were not sealed. When they were removed, it was easy for them to attract dust, hair, etc. The contaminated platters could then crash the disk heads when they were placed back on the drive unit, often resulting in the fixed head(s) crashing as well. It was literally impossible to keep contaminants off these removable platters, and they worked remarkably well given these constraints. Thankfully, those days are behind us, and MTBF (mean time between failure) has become very large and we are rarely troubled by this scenario.
Homework: While you anticipate the next installment of C’mon Back, try to imagine all the things that people could do (or not do) in this environment.

My daughter Danielle has always been interested in science and her school projects were interesting.  Some of my best memories are having the entire family closed up in a warm, humid bathroom in the dead of winter and trying to measure the surface tension of bubbles as opposed to the bubbles she created outside in dry sub-freezing temperatures.  Hurray for the scientific method!

Being in the millennial generation, she learned about computers and backups early on.  While composing a write-up of a science project on our brand-new 286-10MHZ PC, something went wrong and she lost everything.  She had been working on the paper for quite a while, and unfortunately, the setting to auto-save was not turned on.  She became rather demonstrative about this immediately, so I offered to help (or else).  Fortunately, in the days before Windows, there were still many programs that allowed a knowledgeable user to inspect the low-level contents of a hard drive.  I suppose you could compare it to the early days of automobiles when most drivers were also amateur mechanics.

After a couple of hours copying and pasting the jumbled contents of the disk drive into a new text document, I was able to retrieve roughly 80% of her project.  I then made sure the auto-save feature was set, and she went back to work, hitting save about every 15 seconds….

To my knowledge, it never happened to her again.  Danielle has doggedly persisted in having multiple backup targets (including one offsite) during her studies.

Lessons learned:

1. Contrary to popular wisdom, a daughter is often louder than a son.
2. Always turn on auto-save.

To be continued…..