Not to pick on the victim, as it's not his fault - but how could he not make any backups on something that he worked on for five years?
I guess he at least learned 1 thing!
He doesn’t need the data. He isn’t smart enough to get through a successful life anyway.
I’ve saw a multi-million dollar company go under, once, because they’d never bothered to swap the tape in their automated backup system. We’d built the system, for them, to run daily incrementals M-Th, and full backups on F. We’d even eject the tape, when we were done. All they had to do was to put in the next day’s tape (or the next of the set of four F tapes), when they came in in the morning.
When their disk packed up, it turned out that they’d been pushing the Tu tape back in, every day, and their most recent full backup was ten months old.
We made sure they got our bill, before they declared bankruptcy.
It sounds like he suspects somebody in the government stole it. The thief gets to keep the computer and make a 1000 bucks if the guy gets his folder back. The thief has to be somebody in the government. Probably a politician.
Must be working on Global warming.
Now that he has put out his desperation in mentioning a/the grand instead of mentioning just a ‘good/nice/fair etc. reward’, (the crook might have been thinking 50 bucks would be fine before, if a buy back was offered to him, but not now!!) The person with that lap top can now decide a grand ain’t gonna get it! The price of poker just went up imo.
>>Not to pick on the victim, as it’s not his fault
But it is. No different than leaving your keys in the ignition when shopping. This was just waiting to happen and what with Dropbox, Google Drive, and many other drag and drop places to back up data, there is no excuse for it.
Also, a word to the wise - one backup is not enough. If it is corrupted for some reason, and that does happen, you’re screwed. Rotate versions once a week over the period of a month - doesn’t take long.
No backup on his life’s work, and he asks the thief to give him contact info so he can reward him ...
What a maroon!
All you need is Sugar Sync. It automatically syncs up with what you are doing on your laptop as long as it is connected to the internet. And most college campus have wifi everywhere.
I helped set up a few relatives in college with it. They get the paying editions for about $50/year. They have free editions which keep 5Gb in “the cloud” for you or a student
There are other services like Sugar Sync.
Say the student is typing a paper into MS Word. Every time he presses save button (or control+S) he is saving what he has done thus far onto his hard drive AND onto “the cloud” with Sugar Sync
This student with stolen laptop could have survived with the free 5GB edition I am sure. The paper he worked on for years could not have been more than 10-100mb depending on how much graphics
FWIW
Was his master thesis titled “The Importance of Backing Up Information”?
This guy has a bright future ahead of himself in the Federal government.
This individual is too stupid to deserve "phd" after his name.
Or perhaps that is an extreme demonstration of the current state of scholarship in the U.S.
I can't imagine even jr. high schoolers failing the "backup regularly" common sense test.
This story just boggles the brain...
He could have bought 900 2Gb memory sticks with that $1000. And 8 seconds each time he saved the document.
Read the same story at the University of Iowa 15 years ago, and read the same story before that at CU Boulder 20 years ago.
My instinct - someone’s got a critical academic deadline to meet, and they haven't done the work.
Computer disappears, then, they get an automatic extension.
Like the old biker says: “If you got a ten dollar head, wear a ten dollar helmet.”
No kidding! Has he never heard of a flash drive?
Everyone I know who has done a thesis in the last 5 years, immediately transfers it, for this exact reason.
Five years of work, I feel for the kid.
I made so many back-ups on CDs, flash drives and paper that I sometimes became confused as to what was the latest version. I carried the flashdrive with me!
I learned to do all that because of a story a professor told me years earlier: When he was a graduate student his car (with his dissertation inside) was stolen. He never saw either item again. Thankfully he had sent his father a photocopy of his work for safe keeping!
That is one of the things I love about Windows 8.....you get 5 GB free Skydrive space. More if you buy Office 2013.
Your Skydrive is in your folder, like a local drive.
You can access your files from any computer, even if it does not have Office on it.
Lenovo Thinkpad T420S? I’m surprised it last 5yrs and didn’t crash long before that, losing all his data.
Back-up yer stuff.