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From: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.cog-eng,comp.unix.xenix,comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Request for human interface design anecdotes
Message-ID: <3032@phri.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 17-Nov-87 13:09:09 EST
Article-I.D.: phri.3032
Posted: Tue Nov 17 13:09:09 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 19-Nov-87 22:31:52 EST
References: <101@ateng.UUCP> <1402@cuuxb.ATT.COM> <1689@rayssd.RAY.COM>
Reply-To: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith)
Organization: Public Health Research Inst. (NY, NY)
Lines: 21
Xref: mnetor comp.cog-eng:295 comp.unix.xenix:1164 comp.unix.wizards:5495

In article <1689@rayssd.RAY.COM> dhb@rayssd.RAY.COM (David H. Brierley) writes:
> Just the other day I wiped out a weeks worth of work by typing
> "cc -o pgm.c" on my AT&T unix-pc.

	This may sound harsh, but I really have little sympathy in this
case.  That zapping a source file wipes out a week's worth of work implies
that you don't make daily backups.  Even on a PC, doing backups should be
routine every day; there really is little excuse for not doing so.

	Things like emacs's "~" backup files (I'm not familiar with other
editors; I assume this feature is available in vi, etc, as well) mitigate
the damage from "rm *.c" instead of "rm *.o", and similar disasters (at the
cost of some wasted disk space), but daily backups are really the bottom
line.  In fact, I have given serious thought to running incremental
disk-to-disk dumps several times a day here to narrow the window of
vulnerability from a whole day to a few hours.  Yes, I know dumps on live
file systems don't always work, but it's better than not doing it at all.
-- 
Roy Smith, {allegra,cmcl2,philabs}!phri!roy
System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016