ABSTRACT
Most errors aren’t important: but losing data can be a catastrophe, and it happens all too often.
1.1 Example: catastrophe! Davina was under heavy pressure to complete a new procedural manual by Monday morning. She toiled away at the keyboard all weekend, and long into Sunday night, keeping a backup copy of the file on a floppy disk for safety. At about 4 am. on Monday morning she was at last happy with the result, but very tired. Before printing out the final version, she decided to back up the file for the last time. Disaster! In her tired state she copied from Drive A (the floppy) to Drive C (the hard disk), instead of the other way round. As a result an older version of the file was over-written on drive C and the final version was lost. Everything she’d done since 7.30 pm the previous night was wasted. There was nothing for it but to do it all again.
