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This was a hard-work weekend. On Thursday, it seemed like I had lots of code starting to work. It appeared that the imaginary brackets that surround each work package and sub package were closing themselves off, so that the virtual equation that describes my work might seem a little smaller and more tractable. That’s when I pressed the wrong button.

The details of what and how are unimportant, but for the record, selecting just one menu item in Eclipse lost me three days due to the data recovery process. Eclipse is both good and evil; yin and yang; it giveth and it attempt to taketh away. In the mists of time, this will all be forgotten, as will the baking heat of those three particular lost days, because the good news is that despite the heat, I managed to retrieve my work from the incremental backup I made on Thursday, and by 02:00 on Monday I’d reintegrated every improvement since.

So a small level of paranoia data rentention diligence is a good thing, because eventually, even if you avoid the nightmare of a disk failure, you’re bound to press the wrong button: as I did.

The moral of the story is this: backups work.

The subtext to the moral of the story is this: more backups work more.

Yes it took three days to get back to where I was, but that’s better than nothing. To improve matters should I make the same mistake again, I’ve now set the backup process to run every two hours rather than every night.

Obviously all this scrambling and backtracking had an effect on me, and in last nights dreams I found myself in the company of several soviet officers who showed me, on a post it note, several passwords that I have previously used; before passing me a pile of 132 column dot matrix printout (with the tear off tractor edges still attached) containing logs of my computer usage from the last several years.

Maybe it is paranoia after all.