Student Offers $1,000 for Data on Stolen Laptop

[PistolBob]

Dropbox, Box, iCloud, Amazon Cloud, EMC Syncplicity, there are a dozen or so FREE cloud servers you can use for storing gobs of stuff. FREE. Even better and bigger ones you can pay for.

 

[PistolBob]

RAID array? Anyone?

Uh...yeah

 

[perry]

It sucks that the guy had his laptop stolen, but he was just asking for trouble!

Dropbox offers a bunch of free storage for students now, so there's really no reason for any student not to have it setup. It's dead simple to use, works on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and has apps for smartphones and tablets. When I started grad school a year ago, I knew I had to have a simple way of backing up my work because I didn't want to lose even a couple pages of writing. I have Dropbox on several computers now and can get to my school work from anywhere. I can't imagine someone doing original research not having their work backed up.

Hard drives fail all the freaking time; I see them weekly at work and I've heard lots of sob stories from people that were saving stuff to their local drive instead of the network drives. Network drives that are backed up daily and backups get kept for a couple months. I've had people pay north of a thousand bucks to send their drives off to a recovery service to get irreplaceable data back. Just seems like an irresponsible use of company assets to me.

 

[HeadlessRoland]

I'll bite. What good would a RAID array have done here? Even if it's a laptop with a raid controller in it running in Raid 1, both drives would have been taken with the laptop meaning the thief got two copies instead of one, still leaving the student with zero.

RAID 1 on an external as well as HD would definitely have spared him the loss. Not insurance against absolute failure. Nothing is. But he'd at least have one remaining copy at home.

 

[CTS]

RAID 1 on an external as well as HD would definitely have spared him the loss. Not insurance against absolute failure. Nothing is. But he'd at least have one remaining copy at home.

There's a laptop with a raid controller that will allow raid 1 between the internal drive and an external drive? So you constantly have to lug the external drive around with you or create/destroy the array every time you disconnect the external?

Look I'm not trying to be mean, but you know how people who clearly don't know what they're talking about, on a subject you know a lot about, try to pass themselves off as experts? It's like that, I suppose Raid 1 between an internal and external on an e-sata port would actually be possible but it's insanely unlikely, there are only a handful of laptops that even have a raid controller.

Raid 1 is a poor excuse for a backup anyway, that's not even its intended use, it's for rapid recovery when a disk goes bad, it is in absolutely no way intended to be used as a backup.

 

[VikingWarlord]

If I had a nickle for every time someone tried to tell me that RAID was a backup solution...

You don't want to know how many healthcare IT groups think this way.

 

[The Keymaster]

With a Mac time machine is built in. There is no excuse for lost data.

 

[CTS]

You don't want to know how many healthcare IT groups think this way.

Send them my way.

We'll get them hooked up with a VMware+Veeam environment with the appropriate SAN for their needs.

 

[VikingWarlord]

Send them my way.

We'll get them hooked up with a VMware+Veeam environment with the appropriate SAN for their needs.

The ones who don't know what they're doing are way too arrogant to listen to a lowly vendor, even when we see at least one client completely destroy their entire HIS weekly.

The most spectacular was a client running RAID 5, lost a disk, didn't replace it because it was still running. They lost another one and the entire thing **** the bed. Turns out they were running several VMs off the same RAID...which they were also using as a secondary backup solution.

I have no idea how they even made it work, let alone thought it was a good idea. No offsite backups. A year's worth of patient data went up in smoke. Their entire IT department got let go the next day.

 

[JokerGirl]

I would probably crawl into a hole and die if my I ever lost my thesis paper like that. It's bad enough I had to write a 23pg organic chemistry synthesis paper, let alone a 100+ page thesis (soon to happen)....

I can sympathize with his sheer desperation.

 

[CTS]

I have no idea how they even made it work, let alone thought it was a good idea. No offsite backups. A year's worth of patient data went up in smoke. Their entire IT department got let go the next day.

Yikes! I hope that was awhile ago, there are supposed to be audits for that sort of thing now.

 

[VikingWarlord]

Yikes! I hope that was awhile ago, there are supposed to be audits for that sort of thing now.

This was October, I think. There are supposed to be audits.

It's frightening to think that the people I deal with daily are responsible for PHI and administering care.