पंत’साहित्य

I had a hard drive failure the other day, which naturally got me to thinking about backing up data, and about the times I’ve been more paranoid about it. I wrote my PhD dissertation back in those far-off days (1988) when you could put Mac versions of Word and Chem-Draw on one 3.5-inch disk (yes, that was possible, and I still have the disk to prove it). But I went to the disk-swapping trouble of putting my dissertation-in-progress on a separate floppy. So there I was, with a couple of week’s worth of dissertation draft on my floppy disk, when one fine day I insert the thing into the slot, and. . .it can’t be read. Hrm. I try other machines. I try them all. None of them can read the disk, under any conditions. It slowly dawns on me that my two weeks of work have evaporated, and a little later it dawns on me that things could have been much, much worse. I converted to the Backup Religion. Grad students writing up tend to get a bit paranoid under the best conditions. Once I made my back...