This year I bought a new laptop. It was a well respected brand and at the upper end of the range. Four weeks later the hard drive died. They replaced the whole laptop. It just shows that disks can fail at any time.
When I first started using a desktop computer in 1984 (51/4" floppy drives, DOS ver 2 ) I quickly learnt two important principles.
1) If you type in a command (no windows or mice ) and the system responds with "are you sure? Y/N" always respond with N and think about what your doing (don't have to worry about this one any more) and :-
2) The 11th commandment; " Though shall back up thy data lest the plagues of lost bytes descend on your house"
Sorry to be a bit flippant about a very irritating event but using computers in the old days when hardware wasn't as reliable as it is today drove home some very painful lessons.
