Thanks for the support and all, but trust me, it was unsavable. I spent 40 hours trying to save that thing, and brought it to 3 specialty stores.

Back on topic, anyone else have a similar story?

Quote: Original post by The Human Genocide
Thanks for the support and all, but trust me, it was unsavable.

People here were suggesting you to take backups *before* any virus gets in your computer and renders it unusable.

I hate to tell you this, but the data was very likely still there. It's not like a virus can write your entire HD full of garbage before you notice what's going on. They most likely just delete the file allocation table or NTFS equivalent, which only makes retreiving files somewhat harder. From a disk dump you can still find your code just by doing a string search with some function/variable name you remember exactly (the files may be broken to pieces though due to fragmentation, but that's less likely with code, being so small).

Quote: Original post by The Human Genocide
Hey guys, how's it going?

My roomate recently clicked on a banner ad and got me a gigantic virus (That dumbass.) Anyways, I had to clear my entire hard drive and reinstall Windows. Now, that means I lost my source to my 4e5 project, so I have to start over again. :( I remember most of the code though.

I was wondering if anybody else had a story like this.

Get a Flash drive or a Mini USB Harddrive to incrementally dump your project to
(with a .bat file to cleanup all temps to minimize the save image).

Periodicly writing to a CD can be done as well (they are cheap these days...)

You should do a save fairly frequently (once a week minimum).

I had a boss who lost a complete Manual revision (months of work) because he didnt do any backups.


Its possible that you could have put in a new HD (loading OS etc..) and made the old one the D drive and recovered the content before wiping that infected drive.

Quote: Original post by Mushu

Quote: Original post by Richy2k
SVN is your friend! Use it!

SVN doesn't help much unless the server is on a system separate from your dev system.

*learnt the hard way*

aye, that's the safest way, but just having a FSFS repository accessed via the file:\\\\ style url stored on a usb key is a simple alternative to a full subversion server install. Heck you can set up something like that in less then 10 clicks via TortoiseSVN I expect.

Full Backups of the repository are simple that way too - it's a straight file copy as long as you are not using it. Which as there are no service things and the drive is not shared, you can pretty safely say that's the case. You could archive & encrypt it and store it on webspace somewhere in a zip or rar file may be.

I know that if it's plugged in and a virus goes after every drive and not just your system one you're still screwed, but at least it's one more step back from total oblivion.

Quote: Original post by The Human Genocide
The virus deleted everything off my desktop, blocked off the start bar, and disabled task manager.

Wait... deleted everything off your 'desktop computer' or do you mean you actually saved your entire project on the Windows Desktop?

The only code that I have "lost" is the stuff that I haven't bothered coding (which is pretty much everything). I really don't see myself getting any sort of entry in for this contest. It seems as though I haven't had the time or motivation. (If I had the motivation, I would make the time).

I got lucky on the SVN thing myself. My webhost (Dreamhost, cool people) lets me run a SVN server off the same machine. So, I just check in my code pretty much nightly because I bounce between three machines (two workstations at home and work, one laptop that floats). But, using SVN to track code has some other really nice advantages, such as "Ooops, I guess I shouldn't have replaced all instances of cos with pow I better revert" or "what DID I change?"

My harddrive exploded after I finally got the new parts to my computer. Now I have to wait for my new HDD to get here before I can get this thing to work.

Quote: Original post by The Human Genocide
I was wondering if anybody else had a story like this.

I'll prob get rated down for shear stupidity.

I was putting in a newer video card in my machine. It was a bit to dark to see the screws to fasten the card into the bus. Without thinking I grabbed the closest flash light I could find. I then set the flash light on part of the inner skeleton of the case so I could see what I was doing. After putting the machine back together I could not boot it up.

It was then I realized how utterly stupid I was. I had used one of those magnetic flash lights that you shake for power!!! It had wiped some if not all of my hard drive (At least the boot partition). Luckly I did have backups.

Magnetic flash lights and computers, bad.