Thanks CE,
Now I know what _not_ to do, I think! That apparently should include not PMing C:Amie with a copy-and-paste of the timeout error message
A crash - now it's all beginning to become perfectly clear as mud. Of course, everything was backed up both in full copy and incrementally
When personal computers first came out
(long before IBM PCs
), I used to have people, that I was teaching how to use them, delete all of their work at the end of a long session. They would hesitate, and I would assure them that it was OK, and that I was just going to show them what to do to prevent losing their work. They would then dutifully rm -r *.*
(for the *nix lovers out there
and watch as the entire system was wiped slick. Then, they waited for me to show them how to recover their work, to which I replied, "Your work is all gone. Poof. Vanished. No longer in this dimension. The valuable lesson you have learned is to always set up an automatic backup of your files when you start using any system." To this day, every single one of them has enjoyed an existence with computers where they never lose anything
(and, with remote backup over the Net, well, there's just no excuse for complete catastrophic loss at a single site, due to a fire, flooding, etc.
). Of course, I didn't tell them about recovery utilities, because then they wouldn't have learned their lesson, and would have depended on something that doesn't always work
(and is usually very expensive in terms of lost time, if not also money, for no good reason, in any case
).
That's not to say that I don't still do extremely stoopid things with computers, myself
(hey, a guy's gotta live on the edge to keep things exciting every once in a while, right?
).
All the Best,
Joe
