[Sccs-devel] I may have tracked down the infamous 1984 McKusick hard drive crash

[Justin G. <jus...@gm...>]

The crash is referenced here:
https://sccs.sourceforge.net/sccs_vs_rcs.html

Kirk McKusick was at UCB in 1984:
https://archive.is/fVnCS

This post describes it as well, it is quoted below:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35891400

"e40 39 days ago | parent | context | favorite | on: 50 years in
filesystems: 1984 BSD FFS

I was at UCB during this time. Very exciting! Here's a story people may not
know:
The dump program, once the FFS was deployed, had not been modified to
backup the last fragment of a file (because it was smaller, possibly than
4k). There was a disk crash on the VAX with the BSD source code and the
disk company (Ampex, I think) came out and meticulously scrapped the bits
off the disk, so CSRG could recovered the source code. There was no
complete backup of it anywhere else.

That was a fun, early lesson in "test your backups".

Sincerely,

Justin