Terry Pratchett's unfinished novels destroyed by steamroller

Re:Terry Pratchett's unfinished novels destroyed by steamroller by dspillett on Wednesday August 30, 2017 @05:56AM (#15130884)

Could easily have been a drive that had been in his main work machine for quite some time. He no doubt had the good sense to have backups on other local drives and remote services[1], but this could still be his primary store. It isn't like holding the text of books in progress is a task that needs the speediest of SSDs so if that drive just kept working why would he replace it?

[1] presumably these have also been purged if his wishes were so written or interpreted, probably by more conventional means[2]

[2] the bulldozer being used for this one drive for ceremonial purposes

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Re:Terry Pratchett's unfinished novels destroyed by steamroller by johansch on Wednesday August 30, 2017 @07:02AM (#15131123)

SATA drives replaced IDE drives (which this appears to be) more than ten years ago, somewhere around 2004-2006.

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Re:Terry Pratchett's unfinished novels destroyed by steamroller by dspillett on Wednesday August 30, 2017 @10:00AM (#15132171)

PATA drives were still common enough ten years ago, maybe not in brand new machines but certainly in active ones and readily available as replacements/upgrades. Using a machine from ~10 years ago for document authoring isn't unusual. A good keyboard screen is more important than the rest of the machine for that sort of job - you don't need something new, fancy, & powerful, and many authors prefer an older machine because they can't run distractions well!

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Re:Terry Pratchett's unfinished novels destroyed by steamroller by kingbirdy on Wednesday August 30, 2017 @08:36AM (#15131567)

He could have been on an old computer - GRRM, for example, still writes on an MS-DOS machine

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