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His laptop with 4 years of cancer research was stolen. Now he wants the city to take theft more seriously | CBC (archive.ph)

submitted 1 month ago by lemmybea@lemmy.ca to c/uwo@lemmy.ca

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Western PhD student Aswin Sureshkumar lost more than four years of pancreatic cancer research when his laptop and two hard drivers[sic] were stolen out of a car on April 21. He's now pleading with Londoners to not only get the laptop back, but take theft more seriously.

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[–] MadMadBunny@lemmy.ca 55 points 1 month ago

And, maybe take external backups more seriously, too?

[–] Brunbrun6766@lemmy.world 38 points 1 month ago

Yeah fuck opsec I guess? Interesting way to show your potential future employers that you can't be trusted with any data.

[–] lambalicious 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

fam, git exists since, what, 1996?

[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 12 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Linux was developed via a mailing list for the first decade.

It still is, but it used to be, too

[–] lambalicious 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Wow, it's newer than I expected.

Still, not backing up that research when the material possibility, at least with git, has existed for five times your research's lifecycle is... astounding. And I'm not even considering FTP backups!

[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago

Yup. Cloud accounts, university servers, hard copies, HDDs at home, HDDs in the lab - most of these were viable options that I used to back up my own research data before git even existed.

All of my personal projects go into an offsite git server if they're text-based or a cloud account for binary data, with copies spread across all of my working machines.

[–] Luffy879@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 month ago

Here in ze Germany we have the saying: Kein Backup, kein Mitleid

[–] Cassa@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 1 month ago

Expecting police to find a stolen bag without any traces of anything is stupid. And they don't know if they locked the car?!

Backup doesn't mean leaving it one place... this guy would sue the earth for a flood destroying his shit