Laptop with pancreatic-cancer research data lost at Somerville taco shop

By adamg - 7/30/10 - 10:16 pm

Galen Loving, a researcher at Mass. General, reports he accidentally left a laptop at Anna's Taqueria in Davis Square around 7 p.m. on Thursday - and that it's now missing:

The computer has important data on it regarding work we've been doing to study pancreatic cancer. The research data contained within the computer is far more important than the computer itself. If anyone has seen or heard anything about this computer or can assist in any way in the recovery of this data, please ... send me an email at gsloving @ nmr.mgh.harvard.edu. Thank you.

Comments

Back 'em up, back 'em up, back 'em up, and back 'em up again

By Jonas Prang - 7/30/10 - 11:03 pm

#1

The lesson being: If your data are at all important, do backups at every opportunity: onto the research center backup server, onto the lab server, onto the other lab server, rotating onto about a dozen memory sticks, onto DVDs, onto another machine. Every freaking day, twice a day, after every significant transformation of the data, when you think you need to backup, and most importantly when you think you can really get away without doing it this time. Disk space is essentially free. All this costs is time.

This isn't really directed at Dr. Loving; he already feels like crap. This is for all the rest of us who are way too far from our last decent backup

reply

Macs make backups easy, too

By Ron Newman - 7/30/10 - 11:55 pm

#2

They have a nifty program called Time Machine that will make automatic incremental backups to an external hard disk hourly. This was a lifesaver for me last week when my MacBook's internal hard disk failed. Within a few hours after I got a new internal disk, I was back up and running with only an hour or so of lost incoming e-mail.

I hope Dr. Loving used this on his MacBook.