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Subject:Re: Do X-rays Damage Disks? From:Callie <callie -at- WRITEPAGE -dot- COM> Date:Mon, 14 Aug 1995 11:24:25 GMT
At 05:40 AM 8/15/95 -0500, Eric J. Ray wrote:
(in response to my answer to the disk damage question)
>Callie,
>This doesn't have anything to do with technical communication. Please
>help keep us on topic.
>Thanks,
>Eric
>TECHWR-L Listowner
Eric -
I don't know about you, but I often travel while developing technical
material and would be really upset if my work in progress got damaged.
Protecting data intgrity is part of the job of being a technical writer. It
is as much a part of the profession as putting words on paper in a
gramatically correct manner, and using the politically correct pronouns to do
it with.
It's as valid a question as "how to backup and archive?" after a project is
over, or "what software do you use and why?" Both are, strictly speaking, not
"writing" questions at all, they are project management questions. Maybe they
should be in alt.data.backup.over.barney and comp.software.wordprocessing.why
but they aren't.
I have spent hours, as a technical writer, retrieving bad data, either data
that was never backed up as ASCII (and the original source program is long
gone), data that came from typesetters in bizarre coding, or data that was
trashed in a disk crash. It is part of the job.