this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2026
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I remember when my dad was skeptical that I copied a game from my friend's computer onto ours via floppy disk. "A game is too big nowadays to fit on a floppy," he said. "Just you wait," I said.
I had copied the shortcut from the desktop.
A classmate of mine once tried to copy MS PowerPoint by burning the desktop shortcut to CD.
That person either randomly wakes up at 4:00am thinking about that still to this day, or is a robot.
Oo! I have one for this! (Digs through meme collection.)
Oh how excited you must have been when you copied the shortcut onto your computer's desktop and saw that it transferred over just fine.
And then how disappointed once you tried clicking on that shortcut...
I'm front of Dad
There's a chance it didn't copy over fine because it might have grabbed the icon from the shortcut target rather than save it with the shortcut file. So the transfer might have ended with a sinking feeling seeing that blank icon that was confirmed when it was double clicked (maybe with a brief moment of hope upon seeing that it wasn't just an OK error box but had a browse button to find the correct target, before realizing that they didn't have the files).
A guy I know thought he made a backup of all his family photos on an external hard disk. He only copied the shortcuts.
He only found out after disposing of the old computer...
I remember reading a thread on Swedish computer forum.
There was a guy who had "compressed" his whole media livrary and saved it to a floppy disk, reinstalled his computer and now wanted to restor the media files....
Yeah, what he had done was to misunderstand what an MD5 hash was, he thought it was an extremely efficient compression algorithm....
And this is one of the many reasons I tell people that "an untested backup does not exist"
So all you have to do now is go through all the combinations of bits for a file, flag the ones with the same MD5, and manually look through those to see which one it is.
Ow.
You have a promising future in middle management.
😭