VERY LUCKY. But it does raise the fundamental question: does someone who doesn't back up their data deserve to be awarded a PhD
:shock:. I mean, it's PhD for Dummies V.1(beta)
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As long as they can get away with it, I suppose
That's applicable not just for PhDs, but everywhere. It's like saying you can't afford to travel if you do so without travel insurance, really (OK the risk levels are not quite the same, nor are the mechanics, but it's sort of there).
I had mine backed up to either the servers at university, on my USB stick (reasonable price by then), on my laptop, on an external hard drive or saved as a draft's attachment in email. Basically, it didn't matter where it was saved, as long as it was more than two places.
Some PhDs have more things to think about (or cry about) when it goes south. I remember the 2011 floods in Brisbane. It inundated the greenhouses at our university. Lots of students in our institute were crushed as several of their experiments were destroyed. Luckily all of them were given compassionate extensions of their candidatures as well as their stipends.
I had back-ups, just not one from that week. And genetics can produce a of data very quickly. The drive was fine, the computer had just forgotten how to boot itself. Not a difficult fix.
That kind of stuff can give you a bit of a scare, though, especially if fixing it means going through a backdoor to salvage the data. Though the reality is that unless push came to shove, even if one had a backup of everything, normally the system which isn't kicking up with your work on it is the one which you use to work with. So even if you can be content that the data is safe, you're not exactly going to be back to full productivity until you solve the problem anyway.
Of course he was a "Scientist" so knew everything about IT (until this happened)! I can't remember a "redder" face in all my years in IT.
But as I was not an examiner, so I didn't get any input to whether he deserved his Piled Higher & Deeper* degree.
[*This was an old joke from the soil scientist who headed up the joint, saying he had a degree in BS (as in Bull cough), MBS (more BS) and PHD (as above).]
Piled Higher and Deeper is also the name of a comic strip dedicated to the life of a PhD student (and others in the institution):
PHD Comics: Your Thesis Length There's also a movie (and another one!) based on the comic strip.
Really amusing, even if the whole thing has a US centric view of it.
I preferred to use the term "Permanent Head Damage" myself.
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