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Year 2013
- Trying this thing called Bitcoin
- Setup wallet in spare USB drive
- Buy 0.5 BTC (couldn’t afford more)
- Forgot about it
Year 2016
- Remembered I had bought BTC
- Looking like crazy for my USB drive
- Found it!
- Insert it into PC
- only one file in it
- essay_blah_blah_<sisters name>.doc
- poof, gone for ever14 -
I think I've shown in my past rants and comments that I'm pretty experienced. Looking back though, I was really fucking stupid. Since I haven't posted a rant yet on the weekly topics, I figure I would share this humbling little gem.
Way back in the ancient era known as 2009, I was working my first desk job as a "web designer". Apparently the owner of this company didn't know the difference between "designer", which I'm not, and "developer", which I am, nor the responsibilities of each role.
It was a shitty job paying $12/hour. It was such a nightmare to work at. I guess the silver lining is that this company now no longer exists as it was because of my mistake, but it was definitely a learning experience I hold in high regard even today. Okay, enough filler...
I was told to wipe the Dev server in order to start fresh and set up an entirely new distro of Linux. I was to swap out the drives with whatever was available from the non-production machines, set up the RAID 5 array and route it through the router and firewall, as we needed to bring this Dev server online to allow clients to monitor the work. I had no idea what any of this meant, but I was expected to learn it that day because the next day I would be commencing with the task.
Astonishingly, I managed to set up the server and everything worked great! I got a pat on the back and the boss offered me a 4 day weekend with pay to get some R&R. I decided to take the time to go camping. I let him know I would be out of town and possibly unreachable because of cell service, to which he said no problem.
Tuesday afternoon I walked into work and noticed two of the field techs messing with the Dev server I built. One was holding a drive while the other was holding a clipboard. I was immediately called into the boss's office.
He told me the drives on the production server failed during the weekend, resulting in the loss of the data. He then asked me where I got the drives from for the Dev server upgrade. I told him that they came from one of the inactive systems on the shelf. What he told me next through the deafening screams rendered me speechless.
I had gutted the drives from our backup server that was just set up the week prior. Every Friday at midnight, it would turn on through a remote power switch on a schedule, then the system would boot and proceed to copy over the production server's files into an archive for that night and shutdown when it completed. Well, that last Friday night/Saturday morning, the machine kicked on, but guess what didn't happen? The files weren't copied. Not only were they not copied, but the existing files that got backed up previously we're gone. Why? Because I wiped those drives when I put them into the Dev server.
I would up quitting because the conversation was very hostile and I couldn't deal with it. The next week, I was served with a suit for damages to this company. Long story short, the employer was found in the wrong from emails I saved of him giving me the task and not once stating that machine was excluded in the inactive machines I could salvage drives from. The company sued me because they were being sued by a client, whose entire company presence was hosted by us and we lost the data. In total just shy of 1TB of data was lost, all because of my mistake. The company filed for bankruptcy as a result of the lawsuit against them and someone bought the company name and location, putting my boss and its employees out of a job.
If there's one lesson I have learned that I take with the utmost respect to even this day, it's this: Know your infrastructure front to back before you change it, especially when it comes to data.8 -
Story time.
Not sure it counts as data loss, more temporary corruption (and in my own brain).
> be me.
> be clinically depressed
> be recently out of an awful breakup
> recently nearly committed suicide by train
> be bored and lonely one night
> take lsd
> feel fine
> go to McDonald’s
> feel fine
> while eating question the nature of reality
> become convinced I’m an observer of a cosmic story and cannot die
> go outside in only jeans
> run in traffic at 1AM to prove my point
> don’t die
> run around the streets more sure of my new reality than I’d ever been of anything
> feel free and no longer sad
> walk around observing the world
> sit on wall and wonder why the story had the structure I was observing
> fall off wall into grass and mud
> follow cute guy into apartment building
> follow into lift
> ask what everything means
> spend better part of couple hours in lift pressing emergency button asking for help
> get no response
> scare poor Russian lady that gets into lift and finds an overweight topless man on the floor babbling incoherently
> ride to top floor
> get out
> sit on leather chair in corridor
> feelsnice.tiff
> decide I’m actualising my desires and reality
> don’t realise this is just the trip wearing off and consciousness exerting more control
> walk into random apartment (door is unlocked because why wouldn’t it be for the god that I believe I am at this point)
> explore
> gorgeous apartment
> realise it’s a family apartment from clothes in hallway and items
> find bathroom
> decide I want a bubble bath
> run bubble bath
> can’t work out how to drain water. Bath now full of twigs and mud #sorry
> decide that I’d like to go home, or onto my next adventure. Hopefully the seaside as I’m now realising I have more control.
> open bathroom door
> not the seaside. Ah well. Try to walk home
> walk home wrapped in fluffy towel from nice family’s apartment
> get home
> realise what had happened
> throw remaining drugs away
> sit and rock in utter paranoia and guilt for hours until flatmate wakes up.
MFW first bad trip ever.
MFW I wonder whether that family knew I was there and were scared / discovered the mess in the bathroom the next morning and not knowing which is worse.
MFW I still have the towel because it’s fluffy AF.
The moral of the story kids, is that when it comes to the OS rattling around in your brain, installing a virus that is sensitive to what apps you have running is a bad idea when those apps make the virus go to fucking town.
Terrible analogy I know, but fuck it.29 -
At my previous job, the person in charge of the Phabricator server didn't have a backup system in place. I yelled at him until he implemented one.
He had the server perform backups to the same drive. I yelled at him again, to no avail.
Well, after awhile the hard drive started failing, and it would only boot intermittently. After a lot of effort, he was able to salvage part of the backup data, but no more, meaning we lost a lot of bug reports and feedback, and developer tickets. We were able recover all of the older lost tickets from a previous server, so overall the loss was pretty small.
But I think he learned his lesson.
He definitely learned to listen.6 -
After one job interview I ran across this one guy in an elevator.
"Are you an IT? I am looking for one".
I nodded, "Yes, I am". He was about to get off the elevator and told me to save his phone number.
By the time I was about to type the last 3 digits of his number on my mobile, I got a call from my brother and the elevator door closed. I immediately rejected the call.
Unfortunately, the dialer went empty and I lost his number.
I was trying to recall the number but I can only remember the last 3 digits.
I went back to the same floor, but there was around 30 offices and I couldn't find him. I gave up.
Fucking iPhone.6 -
The time my sister dropped the external HDD with every single picture of our family between 2000-2009.
I was 16 at the time, and it made me paranoid like I am today.
Three offsites backups, and three local ones currently and always trying to do expand.9 -
A few years ago:
In the process of transferring MySQL data to a new disk, I accidentally rm'ed the actual MySQL directory, instead of the symlink that I had previously set up for it.
My guts felt like dropping through to the floor.
In a panic, I asked my colleague: "What did those databases contain?"
C: "Raw data of load tests that were made last week."
Me: "Oh.. does that mean that they aren't needed anymore?"
C: "They already got the results, but might need to refer to the raw data later... why?"
Me: "Uh, I accidentally deleted all the MySQL files... I'm in Big Trouble, aren't I?"
C: "Hmm... with any luck, they might forget that the data even exists. I got your back on this one, just in case."
Luck was indeed on my side, as nobody ever asked about the data again.5 -
The ignorance of the 12 year old me destroyed 2years of family memories.
...I wonder what this format option does...5 -
One:
Had a stack of harddrives with my important data, two USB drives and a 4.7gb disc, two or three cloud storage accounts.
Needed a restore:
Knocked the stack of hard drives onto the floor (all broken), stood on one of the flash drives, found the other one in a pocket of a pair of trousers which just came out of the washing machine, dvd too scratched to read and couldn't verify my cloud storage account because I lost the password to the connected email account and the backup email account to verify that one didn't exist anymore. Fucking hell.
Two:
Production database with not that much yet but at least some production data which wasn't backupped.
Friend: can I reboot the db machine?
Me: yup!
Friend: what's the luks crypt password?
Me: 😯😐😓😫😲😧😭
End of story 😅
For the record, the first one actually happened (I literally cried afterwards) and that taught me to update my recovery email addresses more often!9 -
When I was 10 my younger brother saved over my fully completed pokedex in Pokemon blue.
First big data loss taught me a good life lesson. Now I backup everything on a local server.1 -
I started using Keepass and changed all my passwords to auto generated passwords. Somehow, my PC crashed before I saved the database. That was the day, where I lost access to my primary email address.5
-
I studied ancient languages, because of corruption in my home country, I couldn't find any place in academy although my scores were above 90%. Moved to another country and taught myself web development. Naturally in time I lost almost all my knowledge of Latin, Ancient Greek, the whole ancient literature, history, philosophy and culture (everything from historical evolution of tremmas in letter i in ancient Greek to honey fish recipe in ancient Rome cousine). I'm super happy with Webdev tho but I think that also counts as data loss.11
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>Have 64gb memeory stick with software and precious memories (back ups of childhood pictures and stuff)
>Go to girlfriend's house
>Let her borrow it because she needed it for photography (pictures in the TrueCrypt file take only about a quarter of the drive)
>Get dumped by girlfriend after a while
>Shrug and be a little sad
>Find out that i dont have a local copy of what was there
>Don't have courage to ask for it back or even speak to her
>Cry because of now gone data
>Cry because no back ups.
Moral of the story is dont fuck with your back up and also, don't give people precious data, even the ones you trust at the time.4 -
Probably the most rage inducing data loss story...
When it comes to my cellphone I'm a data hoarder, I store each relevant meme, conversation, video, contact, nudes, etc. Had to replace my phone? Easy, change the SD.
I did this for about 4 years, had over 11GB of almost everything and anything in a 36GB SD, one afternoon my buddies and I went to a small tech convention and on our way to my car we got mugged by 5 armed men.
They took my brand new phone along with my wallet and all my cash, luckily I had GPS tracking enabled and we were able to pinpoint the exact location of my phone within 30min.
So far so good...
We called the cops and went with them, we found the car with illegal plates and weapons inside (knives, a bat, gun) so I tell the robbers were in there inside a closed cyber cafe and showed him the point on the map confirming this.
Cop: oh we can't do that we don't have an order...
Me: are you kidding me, here's the GPS, there's the car, there's the weapons, doesnt that count as at least probable cause or some shit?
Cop: we don't have that in this country, you can file a report and after 3 business days we can come here to inquire.
Me: (fucking lost it) do you fucking think they'll be here in 3 days?! I'll give you 500 bucks if you go bust their ass now.
Cop: (thinks about it) but what if they are armed? [4 patrols, 8 cops, 4 rifles and at least 6 guns plus vests] Maybe if you had contacts within the bureau we could have an order now...
(┛✧Д✧))┛彡┻━┻
I lost a lot that day, including respect to this fucked up system.
t(ಠ益ಠt) FUCK THE POLICE go eat a dick.
10 -
Lost two machines with 10years+ of my work and files to the police after a raid some years ago...
They were used in a "crime" cuz I was chatting with my hemp supplier on one of the machines...no chance to get them back...
Oh man, I miss my data...18 -
Worst data loss? Probably back when I was working at gitlab and accidentally dropped a production database....3
-
The goal of one of my CS assignments was to learn about makefile, and during the last minute - literally while I was waiting for the professor to come over - I was just making everything presentable and getting rid of noise. I figured putting rm -r *.* in clean would be a good way to get rid of all the debug output.
To be fair, my project folder was indeed pretty clean afterwards.7 -
The website for our biggest client went down and the server went haywire. Though for this client we don’t provide any infrastructure, so we called their it partner to start figuring this out.
They started blaming us, asking is if we had upgraded the website or changed any PHP settings, which all were a firm no from us. So they told us they had competent people working on the matter.
TL;DR their people isn’t competent and I ended up fixing the issue.
Hours go by, nothing happens, client calls us and we call the it partner, nothing, they don’t understand anything. Told us they can’t find any logs etc.
So we setup a conference call with our CXO, me, another dev and a few people from the it partner.
At this point I’m just asking them if they’ve looked at this and this, no good answer, I fetch a long ethernet cable from my desk, pull it to the CXO’s office and hook up my laptop to start looking into things myself.
IT partner still can’t find anything wrong. I tail the httpd error log and see thousands upon thousands of warning messages about mysql being loaded twice, but that’s not the issue here.
Check top and see there’s 257 instances of httpd, whereas 256 is spawned by httpd, mysql is using 600% cpu and whenever I try to connect to mysql through cli it throws me a too many connections error.
I heard the IT partner talking about a ddos attack, so I asked them to pull it off the public network and only give us access through our vpn. They do that, reboot server, same problems.
Finally we get the it partner to rollback the vm to earlier last night. Everything works great, 30 min later, it crashes again. At this point I’m getting tired and frustrated, this isn’t my job, I thought they had competent people working on this.
I noticed that the db had a few corrupted tables, and ask the it partner to get a dba to look at it. No prevail.
5’o’clock is here, we decide to give the vm rollback another try, but first we go home, get some dinner and resume at 6pm. I had told them I wanted to be in on this call, and said let me try this time.
They spend ages doing the rollback, and then for some reason they have to reconfigure the network and shit. Once it booted, I told their tech to stop mysqld and httpd immediately and prevent it from start at boot.
I can now look at the logs that is leading to this issue. I noticed our debug flag was on and had generated a 30gb log file. Tail it and see it’s what I’d expect, warmings and warnings, And all other logs for mysql and apache is huge, so the drive is full. Just gotta delete it.
I quietly start apache and mysql, see the website is working fine, shut it down and just take a copy of the var/lib/mysql directory and etc directory just go have backups.
Starting to connect a few dots, but I wasn’t exactly sure if it was right. Had the full drive caused mysql to corrupt itself? Only one way to find out. Start apache and mysql back up, and just wait and see. Meanwhile I fixed that mysql being loaded twice. Some genius had put load mysql.so at the top and bottom of php ini.
While waiting on the server to crash again, I’m talking to the it support guy, who told me they haven’t updated anything on the server except security patches now and then, and they didn’t have anyone familiar with this setup. No shit, it’s running php 5.3 -.-
Website up and running 1.5 later, mission accomplished.6 -
So my schoolmate asked me to reformat his computer, not before backing up his father's work data. Medical data of his patients.
He had two hard drives, C: and D: . Easy job, it could be done in four steps:
1- collect all data into c:\backup
2- xcopy /e c:\backup d:
3- format c:
4- move all data from d:\backup back to their original places.
Guess which step did I forget to do?
Yes, step 2.8 -
A teacher of mine once asked me if i could take a look at his external HDD because all the data was suddenly gone. Important holiday pictures and stuff...
Turned out he accidentally created a Windows 7 "library" based on the root directory of the drive. Next logical step to get rid of it: delete the whole content because "i don't need the data twice".
Explained the concept of directory links and restored the files...
His wife later asked him about the reason for the data loss. He didn't have the balls to tell her that he deleted them himself even though he knew it at that point =D -
TLDR; My 2TB HDD got wiped in one fell swoop by a 9-year old child.
You know... I've never been too great about keeping backups. Even to this day, I only keep one or two local backups and nothing on the "cloud".
So this was about 5 years ago. At the time, I was living together with my girlfriend - who would later become my wife. She had a son from a previous relationship, who at the time was 9 years old.
I had a small desk in the living room of our one-bedroom apartment, that I used for my computer, which has been a laptop for a long time now. One unfortunate thing about the layout of the apartment was that the wall plug near my desk was attached to a light switch.
I had a 2TB external hard drive - with its own power cable - plugged into my laptop. Then, things started to move in slow motion... The GF's son comes inside from playing, my GF asks him to turn off the light. He reaches over, and shuts off power to my laptop - and the external hard drive.
He must have hit that switch at JUST the right fucking time. The laptop ran on battery, no big deal. The hard drive, when I powered it back up - was wiped clean. I tried data recovery on it, but the HDD was encrypted, which makes things more complicated.
Needless to say, I was not happy. I never got that data back, but I did learn not to expose my hard drives to 9 year olds. Very dangerous little creatures.
You want to know the best part? He destroyed another hard drive of mine, a few years later. Should I tell that story?5 -
So probably about a decade ago at this point I was working for free for a friend's start-up hosting company. He had rented out a high-end server in some data center and sold out virtualized chunks to clients.
This is back when you had only a few options for running virtual servers, but the market was taking off like a bat out of hell. In our case, we used User-Mode Linux (UML).
UML is essentially a kernel hack that lets you run the kernel in user space. That alone helps keep things separate or jailed. I'm pretty sure some of you can shed more light on it, but that's as I understood it at the time and I wasn't too shabby at hacking the kernel when we'd have driver issues.
Anyway, one of the ways my friend would on-board someone was to generate a new disk image file, mount it, and then chroot to that mount path. He'd basically use a stock image to do this and then wipe it out before putting it live.
I'm not sure exactly what he was doing at the time, but I got a panicked message on New Years Day saying that he had deleted everything. By everything, he had done an rm -fr /home as root on what he had thought was the root of a drive image.
It wasn't an image. It was the host server.
In the stoke of a single command, all user data was lost. We were pretty much screwed, but I have a knack for not giving up - so I spent a ton of time investigating linux file recovery.
Fun fact about UML - since the kernel runs in user space as a regular ol' process, anything it opens is attached to that process. I had noticed that while the files were "gone", I could still see disk usage. I ended up finding the images attached to their file pointers associated with each running kernel - and thankfully all customers were running at the time.
The next part was crazy, and I still think is crazy. I don't remember the command, but I had to essentially copy the image from the referenced path into a new image file, then shutdown the kernel and power it back on from the new image. We had configs all set aside, so that was easy. When it finally worked I was floored.
Rinse and repeat, I managed to drag every last missing bit out of /proc - with the only side effect being that all MySQL databases needed to be cleaned up.3 -
Ages ago, it was still in the last millenium which will not end soon at that point of tine, I had a 10MB HDD in my first computer. It was a gift and second hand, and DOS 3.2 was installed on it, and my younger self, unable to talk or write english, had that cool game on it (Pitfall, if I remember correctly). But that game was not enough, so I tried to enter all the filenames in all the folders to find other games on that machine. Some commands were ther which I have not understand correctly, and one of them was 'format'. Typed in 'format' and pressed enter, an error message appears that I have to enter a drive letter as argument. Because I had known only A: for the floppy drive and C: for the HDD i tried at first with the floppy. Nothing happens, vecause there was no disk in the drive. Then I entered C: ...
Poof, everything deleted...
I was unable to setup that pc again and my so beloved game was gone also.. still sad about it, because that machine would be a real treasure today but it is gone a long time ago.1 -
Not really tech, but...
I used to handwrite a lot of fiction in several notebooks that I kept over the years. House went through a bad flood in 2013, basement where the notebooks were stored got full up, lost all the notebooks 😭
Now I don't even have a basement2 -
This is a follow-up of my last rant: https://devrant.com/rants/1323422/...
TLDR; My step-son tripped over my HDD power cord, sending it plummeting towards certain death.
So this is just over a year ago. At this point, my GF and I are married, and she's about 7 months pregnant with our daughter. Her son, Nicolas - the one from the last rant - is 13 years old.
So it was a Saturday, and I had Nicolas helping me to clean up the apartment. My wife was off the hook, because, ya know - she's pregnant.
While I was cleaning the living room, I had Nic cleaning the kitchen/dining room area. At this same time, I had my laptop and a 3Tb external USB hard drive on the dining room table, copying a bunch of data or something. This external HDD also had it's own power cord, which was plugged in next to the table.
Next thing I know, I hear an "Ohp!" followed by a crash. It was the horrifying sound of my hard drive plunging 36 inches off the table towards certain death. And death, it had.
Before even checking, I knew this HDD was dead. It took a lot for me not to snap at the kid. I told him to get out of the kitchen and go clean his room. That hard drive... hadn't been backed up. At all, which is on me. Even more so, since that data was really irreplaceable.
Even knowing that the HDD HAD to be dead, I still plugged it in, hoping for a miracle. I got nothing, it wouldn't even spin up.
$ dmesg -w
Showed that linux saw the USB controller and even the HDD controller (it printed out the manufacturer, SeaGate). The data was valuable enough that I was saving up some money to have the data recovered, which would be about $2,000.
However, before I had saved up enough money... My apartment was broken into and all my external HDD's (and some internal ones I had laying around) were stolen.6 -
Well... I accidently deleted a whole tables contents and the day just has started. Fuck this day already.2
-
$ mysql -uroot -p > file.sql instead of
$ mysqldump -uroot -p > file.sql
And not checking the result file before reinstalling my server 😭😭2 -
This was about 3 years ago. I’m on vacation and just getting off the plane, when my boss calls me on his cellphone. Apparently the crontab on our main file upload server had gotten nuked, and he was asking if there were any backups.
A word about this server. I work with video, so this thing is doing about a few gigabits of traffic incoming at any moment. The cron jobs are necessary to move and organize these massive files into a sane scheme for processing. Hundreds of drop folders receiving thousands of files resulting in terabytes of data every single day. Our storage vendor tells us we have the third largest deployment they know about.
No cron jobs mean all of this content is just sitting around piling up. I tell him sorry, try contacting $otherAdmin since he’s more familiar with that system.
A few days later, after the vacation, I come back in. $boss and $otherAdmin have reconstructed the crontab from scratch after an all nighter.
I ask how it got deleted.
$boss was training some people how to set up new customers on this file server, and he told the trainees to open the crontab in read-only mode. One of them ran:
crontab -r
Yes, we back up our crontabs now.3 -
Once upon a time, an IT major named adamyeti thought it was a good idea to work on projects directly off of a flash drive with no backup. Halfway through a large ASP.NET project, the drive failed. I fumbled through a free drive recovery tool, but all of the data was scrambled and corrupted.
I ended up having to start from scratch on the project, but I learned my lesson for sure.1 -
A friend of mine had a MacBook. She had a DSLR too and she used some software on her mac to transfer the files on it.
At one point she ran out of space and thought that it's a good idea to uninstall that software as a temporary solution. The software took all her childhood pictures with it.4 -
Had a laptop on which i learned programming. bought a new convertible for uni, so i passed my laptop to my younger sister.
-> time to move data from old to new device. thought i didn't have that much data, mostly installed programs, so i thought alright i'm fine.
sister doesn't know how to reset so i do it ...
halfway through the reset process i realize i forgot all my programs i had written, including many java, a c#, and some written android apps i was kinda proud of ... plus my neural network i had finally finished with much struggle😥
there goes my history *poof* when i got worse in school 'cause of programming ... smth in me died in that moment 😑4 -
Back when SharePoint was still foreign to me, and I didn't know the pain of administrating it, I had the idea that files were copied to my local machine. I saw no need to preserve backups from before I started, especially since they already existed on the server, so I got rid of them.
Also hooked up to SharePoint was an email handler. Whenever a case was created or deleted, an email went out to the entire department. Guess what happened when I deleted 250,000 records?
Fortunately, SharePoint has a recycle bin. Unfortunately, restoring those files generated another 250,000 emails. To the whole department.
I bought many donuts to appease the crowd baying for my blood.2 -
Testing an attendace machine API one by one so i know what does what.
And there’s an API for wiping all the attendance data stored in the machine.
I didn’t realize it until i push the damn button.
The attendance machine just become fresh like new 😱😨😰
Shit.
A testing session just become an extreme sport.
Thankfully the IT guy has a backup but just up to last month.
Well, it’s better than nothing isn’t it?
He just tell his boss that the machine was run out of memory and the attendance data for the current month were not saved.
And he ask him to buy me some machine for testing.
Yes, i was living on the edge by testing in the production machine. -
Well... I once accidentally deleted a classmates entire assignment. Basically we were working together on one and we had the code in Github, I had named the repo after the module code.
He was having some weird git issues and I thought it would be easier to just delete and re-clone on his machine. You can probably see where this is going.
Me: rm -rf <DIR NAME> Enter
Him: wait, which folder did you just delete
Turns out he had the repo cloned inside another directory with the EXACT SAME NAME, which also contained his previous assignment, the only copy of it in the entire universe (it was a group project and they did it all on his laptop with no source control, which i found hilarious).
It wasnt so bad since that assignment was already submitted and graded, but a bit of a fail on both our parts. -
At one point, my laptop's hard drive went down. Turns out, windows had written some garbage data to the mft, and fucked up the file structure. Luckily i was able to restore a big chunk of the data using recuva. I cleaned the disk after saving the most important files, cleaned the disk, reinstalled windows. All good so far. I put the laptop's drive and my recovery disk into my desktop to put back the files. During the install in forced me to make an account, which I wanted to delete. So I ran "rmdir /users /s" and went to grab a cup of coffee. Turns out, cmd was pointed at my recovery disk instead of my laptop disk. My whole backup wiped.1
-
I just got a new phone, a Tecno device with a measly 8GB internal storage. Decided I'll have to root it, and force part of my class 10, 32GB mem card as adopted storage.
Went online, learnt for a few weeks, successfully rooted, and began enjoying the vast benefits.
But there are no good endings. Months later, while doing some heavy gaming, my phone reboots... and everything on the memory, pack up and go on a vacation... -
I was just removing empty folders from my MOTO X (Devs sometimes get time to kill).
Saw an empty folder "/storage/emulated/0/"
...DELETED...
~Everything has gone from my gallery, music and I felt like sinking~
Sometimes I think, it is good not being an Android Developer...(Unfortunately I'am)
The positive part of the story:
>>fastboot OEM unlock
I rooted my phone and did too many crazy things I could do with a rooted phone.2 -
Got my laptop back from SquareTrade today. This is after a month, 2 weeks of which they gave no status updates.
Per their "Repair Summary":
Reported issue: Power/Charging port
Actions: Repaired
Parts repaired/replaced: None. OS reloaded
(Note this was originally a Windows 10/Gentoo setup)
WTF??? I thought the extra M2 SSD they included might have been the drive they had replaced, but nope. Both are blank (one W8/what the computer originally came with, the other W10).
I'm at a loss right now.1 -
During my master's, I designed the year book. And then the hard disk crashed. That yearbook h hasn't seen the light of the day3
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I remember the first time I was experimenting with Linux and decided to install Kali Linux (was still version 1 at the time) and in the process cleaned my hard drive. I was in first year and I hadn't been introduced to git, so you can imagine what happened to my code.
Or when I dumped all my databases into one SQL file (the feature looked tasty in phpmyadmin) and then after reinstalling everything, I couldn't import back the files.
Or last year, where I was on industrial attachment. So we were to delete some data from DHIS2 manually. So as a developer I grouped all organisation units to be deleted under one parent and wrote a python script to recursively delete anything in that group. Just when I was about to show my supervisor how efficiently my script was deleting stuff, he said, "Don't delete anything yet". I hope he doesn't read this *wink*
Fast forward, last week on Friday I dropped my external hard drive. It just works on one USB port now, no idea how and why. -
Living on the edge!
One or two years ago I managed to deploy a DDL change directly on the production server. As I knew there was a backup job which will run every day at noon and at midnight. So I run my script some minutes after noon. So far so good. But somehow I tested it badly in my test environment and the UI of the application throws error after error now in production.
Well, just revert the db to the latest recovery point with the backup, I thought.
It became clear then after a couple of minutes of searching the backup folder for the db backup that there was no such file. The youngest backup file was 3 years old.
Now what happened: The backup script had a switch "simulate=true" and then simulated a successful backup on each run. Therefore the monitoring system got no alerts for not correctly executing those jobs correctly. Then the monitoring job which should do the backupfolder surveillance stuck with green, because there was a valid backup file inside. But it did not check for a specific creation date.
Now this database is the one we need for doing our daily business and is really crucial. Therefore It was easier to emergencyfix the application than doing a rollback of the db 🙄
Well, not really a data loss story, but close to one. -
When Microsoft shuttered Windows XP, my mom's old laptop became a virus-prone, sluggish machine. She let me have it, soon after which I decided to install Ubuntu on it. One thing I should note about this laptop is that the battery could not hold a charge. The power cord was the laptop's life support, and I made sure to place the power brick on a flat surface.
One day, a new version of Ubuntu was released. I decided to perform a dist-upgrade. Because this laptop was on the older side, the ventilation left a lot to be desired by today's standards. Rather than roast my crotch, I placed my computer on the table and the power brick on a swivel chair next to me.
I was working on an assignment for a class when I saw movement in my peripheral vision. I turned and watched in horror as my power brick fell off the chair, pulling the charging cord out of the laptop and turning off the laptop... MID-UPGRADE!
Moral of the story, learn to navigate a computer via a text interface if you haven't already. It may save your ass someday. It saved mine.2 -
Not exactly a data loss, but on server hosting almost all of clients' websites.
$ crontab -e
Except finger slipped and it became -r. *facepalm*1 -
A fun story on how I lost my end of year project :
Last year was my first year of college in computer science. To get to my school, I need to take two different buses with a kilometer distance between them.
The day that I had to send my end of year project, which was worth 25% of my final grade, I thought that it would be fun to use my skateboard to get to the second bus instead of walking. So, I got out of the bus, started skateboarding towards the second bus and, about 20 meters later, my wheel got stuck on a small rock which was big enough to make me do a front flip. I landed on my back and broke my left arm.
An hour later, at the hospital, I tried to send my project to my computer science teacher but I quickly realised that my spectacular fall destroyed my laptop's HDD and my end of year project.
And this is how I learned how important it is to back up my files in the cloud.8 -
*leaning back in the story chair*
One night, a long time ago, I was playing computer games with my closest friends through the night. We would meet for a whole weekend extended through some holiday to excessively celebrate our collaborative and competitive gaming skills. In other words we would definitely kick our asses all the time. Laughing at each other for every kill we made and game we won. Crying for every kill received and game lost. A great fun that was.
Sleep level through the first 48 hours was around 0 hours. After some fresh air I thought it would be a very good idea to sit down, taking the time to eventually change all my accounts passwords including the password safe master password. Of course I also had to generate a new key file. You can't be too serious about security these days.
One additional 48 hours, including 13 hours of sleep, some good rounds Call of Duty, Counter Strike and Crashday plus an insane Star Wars Marathon in between later...
I woke up. A tiereing but fun weekend was over again. After I got the usual cereals for breakfast I set down to work on one of my theory magic decks. I opened the browser, navigated to the Web page and opened my password manager. I type in the password as usual.
Error: incorrect password.
I retry about 20 times. Each time getting more and more terrified.
WTF? Did I change my password or what?...
Fuck.
Ffuck fuck fuck FUCKK.
I've reset and now forgotten my master password. I completely lost memory of that moment. I'm screwed.
---
Disclaimer: sure it's in my brain, but it's still data right?
I remembered the situation but until today I can't remember which password I set.
Fun fact. I also could not remember the contents of episode 6 by the time we started the movie although I'd seen the movie about 10 - 15 times up to that point. Just brain afk. -
A few days after the vacation, daddy (me) finally finished copying all the photos from the digital camera to the big external hard drive. Left it lying in the living room, in the corner where all the tech stuff frequently lies. In come my boys, and I'm not sure why, they start plugging power supplies around. Unfortunately the one from the laptop fit into the hole on the external disk, but had a different (higher) voltage. Result: 1 fried hard drive, containing all the baby photos and videos of said boys up that time.
I still believe that it's only the circuit board that is fried, and the data is still all there. I still have the hope to find a used disk, replace the board and all will be back.5 -
Update Table_Name Set Column_Name = ‘New Value’;
Commit;
I did this on prod and my manager started screaming on me.
Is there any issue in it?5 -
Was in the middle of working on a game I had been working on for a couple months but had the original copy already corrupt so I was working on bringing it's backup up to the originals point...
Suddenly the power went down mid save, turned the computer on aaaaaaaaand it's corrupt, ended up cancelling the game because I didn't have time to rewrite and build everytbing from scratch again...
Now I don't use hard backups, all gets backed up to the cloud for easy roll back 👍2 -
As a kid, I wanted to try new stuff. New programs, new games, new websites, new OSs. Those were the days when we had very limited and slow access to internet and cloud was still to be discovered. I had everything on my local HDD.
So one fine day I decided to try out Ubuntu on my Windows 7 Laptop.
I emptied a partition, burnt the image to a USB drive and booted from it. Installation went well.
Somehow I ended up deleting the logical partitions on my Windows machine. Not only I was not able to boot into Windows, my HDD was just one tiny partition. I cried my eyes out. That disk had everything I ever had.
PS: I recovered everything by restoring the partitions.5 -
So, this was about 6 years ago, I had a small HDD of only 80 gigs dedicated for projects code, models, textures etc.
I didn't use GitHub or anything as a backup.
One morning when I turned my pc on I could hear a metal on metal-ish sound, no idea what it was, when windows finally booted ... And I wanted to start coding again, the 80 gig HDD was unformated like brand new ...
Few hours later I gave up and opened the HDD, the arm fucked up the disk inside ... Rip
I started backing up my shit ever since -
I once accidentally deleted the live versions of my websites instead of the development versions (which I wanted to delete because I was going to start over from the live versions.) After several hours of digging through backup folders, I finally found the latest backup files, which were a few months old.
It took me a few hours to get the backed up versions to the same version they were when they were live. In all this, I have learned to keep the live and development versions of my sites in completely different locations.14 -
So I was trying to root my Xperia Z2, starting by unlocking the bootloader. I rushed through the confirmation boxes to get the code, I entered it on fastboot... And realized I haven't made a backup. Phone restored to factory state. At least I had saved my photos on the SD card, but all the files, settings, configs and apps were gone along with my IM conversation database that I hadn't backed up for a month.
And I still haven't finished rooting that device.1 -
I wrote some ISO my 8GB flashdrive, then I realised what I did (fuckfuckfuckfuckfuuck) and formatted it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯2
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I was doing some maintenance on a production server for a game hosting company (Minecraft hosting, for those interested). A week before, I had created a backup of an account directory before trying to solve an issue, I now wanted to remove this directory.
Since I am way too confident in my ability to not mess up, I was logged in as root.
Instead of typing `rm -rf ../` (I know using -f is a bad idea), I typed `rm -rf /`.
The distro we were using did not have any protections built in.
The directory I wanted to remove as gone, but so was the rest of the server once I realized what I had done.4 -
I really got in love with nodejs and shit. And to be honest, the whole async thing isn't that shitty either. I mean the performance itself seems to be whack af (see onoff benchmarks for reference) but your whole project is more responsive.
BUT FOR FUCKS SAKE THE ASYNC WRITE DOWN OF A SETTINGS FILE FOLLOWED BY SOME STUPID CRASH INDUCING MISTAKE I MADE MYSELF, LEADING TO THE WRITE FUCK UP AND ESSENTIALLY ERASE THE FUCKING CONTENTS OF THE DAMN SETTINGS FILE IS JUST LIKE SMEARING TOOTHPASTE ALL OVER MY FRIGGIN BALLSACK! -
When you accidentally forget the wk98 tag as well as the time it happened...
Thank you guys for caring about the anime I lost. Love this community2 -
Lost all my Data, due to electricity loss. Lost about 1.8TB of data, didn't have backup as I didn't have any other media to backup to. :/4
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TL;DR - (almost) childhood trauma due to Wesrern Digital crap products lead to lot of data loss and a plege to not trust or purchase their products for the rest of my life.
....
So, I got my first ever Wester Digital 2TB Mybook, back when 2TB was a really big thing. While in the midst of moving (not copying) a LOT of data to it, the damn disk just.. died. There was no fall, no power outage, no damage, it just stopped working. I was out of words and out of options. Tried yanking out the disk and connecting it directly to a system, but no luck because it looks like it's the HDD mobo that died.
Also stupid young me did not realise back then that, even if a "moved" the data, the original data is still most likely in their original location, and so, never bothered a recovery.
Lots of good stuff lost that day.
And as with a lot of you, my disaster recovery system kicked up 10 fold. Now I got redundant local and cloud backup copies of all critical and otherwise unattainable data.
As you may have guessed, I never bought another Wester Digital product ever again. My internal HDDs are Segate, and external is a suprisingly long lived Toshiba Canvio.6 -
Oh well, glad it's not a wk98 rant, just annoying to install and sync the data, this time I am going to do a full image backup after installing the basic things
1 -
My biggest data loss and also contributed in me getting into computer stuff was when dad formatted the computer before I was able to take a backup, felt so bad at that time it had all my photos from school with friends.
So instead of crying in the corner and me not knowing they can be brought back, at least half of them, I started learning how computers work, how software work, what type of software is out there ...etc. Though that brought more work for dad having to format my mess every month of so XD
But I ended up learning a lot of new things. Then one programming class at school sent me into the dev world2 -
My uncle's photos dating to 7-10 years. It was a massive collection of family photos. My brother took his laptop for learning development. Then we decided to install Linux into it. But it never came to our mind that there were that kind of a photo archive in a folder somewhere. So eventually were installed linux by removing partitions and creating them from ground. Everthing is lost. It's been more than month and we don't have the guts to tell him the truth.5
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So, when I was like 18 I made an app for a guy who stole a phone book database in paper and was paying people to pass it to access.
He asked me a program to make it easier to add data, he was paying people to do it one by one to an access db.
So I made that and a module to join all the dbs and check for existing ones (there was no way to join access db back then).
When he told me he didn't want it anymore...
So I deleted the sorce code and gave the binary to an uncle to use as a phone book for work.
Two weeks latter the guy called because he didn't know how to join the dbs. Well the source wasn't lost... I just deleted it and told him that if he had paid my software would take care of it... -
So when we started this project like 4 years ago... new to the framework, kickstarting lot's of forms with file uploads. Everything seemed to work fine, uploads and downloads worked..
First version of the project got deployed to prod and for weeks or so users have been registering and submitting stuff...
Only problem was: most files were overridden by consecutive uploads as our central upload lib stored files with the same name on disk (normally the ID of the db row was injected but most files were saved before the db row was - resulting in 0 IDs...)
Yeah so... that hurt :(1 -
2 years ago, the first day in Viareggio(Italy):
walked 30min on the beach searching the "free beach", walking with cool bag, umbrella, and backpack in the hot summer sun...
finding the "free beach": drop everything I had and run to the water to cool down...
forget iPhone in my swimming trunks :(
1. five weeks without a phone (really relaxing;))
2. have no iOS device for restoring the backup... because I bought an oneplus 31 -
While smoke testing in production, I had to delete the sample entity I created to test the released feature, which is not a big deal
Until 20 minutes later, when I realized that I attached a couple of sub entities under it that contained actual live data1 -
I saved my uni work onto a floppy disk (2001) and walked a mile into university library to print it. When I got there and put it into the computer it had corrupted and the disk was unreadable! Luckily I had a back up on my computer so had to walk the mile back, saved again onto two different floppy disks this time and walked the mile back. This time I managed to print it and deliver the work 5 minutes before the deadline.
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Long time ago cleared chrome history. Had the clear passwords box checked... Fuck. Spent hours recovering passwords. Then switched to lastpass
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So arround a month back , I was watching videos and photos I clicked in the vacation I went.
All the photos and videos were in a 1TB harddisk and I connected to my TV for better viewing experience.
In the mid way, I had a power cut and suddenly TV switched off.
This was not supposed to happen because my inverter has to kick in !
Fuck it , something happened to my inverter and delay was just enough to switch the TV off.
Now TV is on , harddisk is recognised and
Hell yeah! There are no files in the harddisk!
I lost my shit !, Before I do any thing, I tried to recover the files, luckily some vacation images and videos were recovered but all of my project source code(the ones I Did not push it to github, those were done when I was learning), most of my documents etc.. were gone!
May not be the worst one , but I lost all my coding memories.I mean those projects were done in my school times.2 -
When I rented my server I uploaded my webpage (including resources like videos, images etc) which is about 150GB as .tar and extracted and setup all that stuff and deleted the backup from my PC. The uploading process took me about 4 days. I opened the site of my server provider and reloaded it.. Aaaaannddd whoops. All data gone.
On my server hosters webpage when you click the reinstall button for installing a Linux image you get returned to the main page of that server after it finished installing. If you then reload that page which basically only shows some monitoring diagrams and shit the server gets reset again.
Damn. I lost so much good porn on that day... -
I came to work when and found out the boss had fucked up:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/important_HDD_for_VMs7 -
Accidentally ran
$ git reset --hard
On my 2 weeks worth of uncommited code.
Thankfully Intellij has a local history. 😥7 -
So, yeah...
Something like 2 years ago? I was bored in school, so I decided to make something on website that I was creating then...
I wrote few lines and sent file to the server.
BANG!
I don't know how, but I saved it as "index.php" in the root folder of website. I overwritten fucking index.php, lost this fucking file. Soo... I had two options: make index.php from the beginning, or restore backup and loose changes form 24 hours. I choosed the second option. -
Just any time at all I had to use Microsoft Word 98 as a kid. Rip every paper ever before I learned to save constantly.
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So, My usual dual boot setup is Linux(Dev stuff) and Windows(For gaming) and for Linux I always create different partition just to make sure I don't fuck up while removing Linux(mostly switching). So at one time I wanted to switch to CentOS and I accidentally deleted windows partition of C drive which had like 90+GB just for Steam....it was not Big loss but still it was pain downloading data for steam games.
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This story was related to me while I was in university.
So a long time ago, (in a galaxy far far away). This student was working as an intern at some tech company. He was running some queries, everything was fine. He decides that's good enough and heads for lunch.
When he comes back the query does not work. He notices the others around him start to stand up asking if anyone has a connection.
Turns out that an intern, at another building, basically deleted everything. I'm guessing they did not add this internship to their resume. -
One time my friend was torrenting random programs and etc and he downloaded a ton of software. He got a ransomware and he didn’t know how to fix it, so his whole computer had to be cleared out and he never torrented again.1
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I've already ranted about this, the hdd randomly broke over night. I was (i shit you not) just about to set up backups for it this day.
Being relatively new to linux but confident with bash and cli and stuff.. reading "I/O Error" as output of nearly any command on a server rented somewhere 150 km away from me was like a punch in the face.:D
It wasn't directly bad, but it was kinda sad, I had a (now don't laugh - a man gotta chill from time to time) minecraft server running there with tons of mods and we were multiple 100s of hours into it already..
But not only that, my projects weren't on any git or anything anymore (local copies were gone, guess what gitlab i set up proudly i used..) and there was no recovering these little loved ones, together with my website.
It was a black day, my group i had to work with in university doubted me because for them i wasn't able to manage a git server properly and i hope it does not happen again..): -
Guys, I think they are asking about Big Data Loss. People thought it's about Data Loss.
My Big Data Loss experience is when everyone in Hong Kong starts talking about big data using spreadsheets. So lost.1 -
Transferred a lot of important files in between PC with a 32 GB thumbdrive. One time, when I needed it the most, it couldn't read. It had the original up-to-date information on everything. Backup files were old and found in either emails, in another PC somewhere else and on an ex-colleagues laptop that, due to poor office management, lost track of where that laptop is.
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Me and my family had gone to Paris and Switzerland for vacation. We took alotta photos, there's was about 10GB worth photos in our iPad. The iPad was not working properly, so I backed up the photos to my laptop and gave the iPad for formatting.
Unfortunately, one fine day, my laptop shut down and never switched on again (long story short). We gave it for fixing, but it's still not fixed.
And so we lost all our photos, now there's no proof that we went to to those places 😆6 -
I tried to transfer some data off my mother's hard drive with several hundred gigabytes of photos and videos, which spanned most of her life.
I decided to format the hard drive I was copying the data to.
I formatted the wrong drive.6 -
I don't know how much of this can be considered data loss but one one of my uni classmates frustrated by some hellish tasks (cleaning some old code files probably) decided that everything in that particular directory won't be of any further need, so she procede to rm -rf it.. only to discover that the terminal opened in that dir was another one and her current one (the one she bashed that unforgiving rm) was in fact a standard freshly opened term where any term would open.. in the user's (only user) home dir... such a face she had when all her codes, homeworks, projects and everything went to oblivion 😂😂 jokes aside it was a good thing that the semester was almost finished, all hws submited and no important data was there as she dual booted with ubuntu and some windows, but funny thing how such a honest mistake can ruin not only your day, but maybe your entire semester1
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A few months ago I lost my laptop that had my school project and our start-up projects. Hadn't learned about version control by then. I had a rough time explaining to the time where the projects were as they were due in a weeks time. Spent the next 5 days rewriting the project. It came out more neater and faster than the previous one :)1
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I guess my terrabyte drive that failed on me. Killing my psu in the process. It malfunctioned roughly 3months after installing. Luck, i had warranty, badluck, no backup and no recovery program that could do the trick.1
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This one was thanks to the beloved MariaDB.
I needed to update a record with id = 12345
I copied the id to the clipboard.
Then proceded to type:
UPDATE table SET field = NULL WHERE Ctrl+v
So it ended up
UPDATE table SET field = NULL WHERE 12345
I forgot to type "id = " after the "WHERE".
MariaDB says "OK, after the WHERE any number means TRUE".
Simple update taking longer than 0.000001 seconds means bad news. And if you add that I was making the stupid update using phpMyAdmin, I couldn't cancel it faster. I had to log into terminal and kill it from there. Some hundred of thousands of records updated to null, thank you.
It was a testing database, and we had a backup so I had to take my good 30 minutes to restore it but it was not cool.5 -
Deleted the database of an application I built for college since they were replacing it with a better one. Later, the teacher remembered that he didn't take a backup.
Fortunately, I remembered I had configured a cron job an year back in the app which saved me that day. 😅 -
Made lots of features to a side project that I was gonna publish in uni. There was some merge conflicts. And I tried to fix by copying files from a backup of the repo I was using.
Accidentally deleted the latest repo instead of the backup. All additions were uncommitted.
That was when I started taking special care with VCS -
Two years ago my laptop crashed and wouldn't boot windows anymore. Luckily I had already handed in all small projects and backed up the rest. However, I still had to install all my programs on a fresh new windows installation.
I decided to give Linux a try since it was an old laptop and I have to say that my data loss situation was not bad at all but getting into solving Linux errors can take quite some time out of your day, especially in the beginning. After a week of spending time here and there to improve the situation I had pretty much everything setup to the point where I could start development again. I have to say that it has changed my workflow and that I'm loving Linux now. I started out with Ubuntu and now I'm trying out some other distros on my second laptop (if you got any suggestions please let me know).
I still use windows side by side with Linux for certain tasks, but I'm not regretting losing my windows installation on my laptop. It made me realize that there's much more out there to learn and to give a try.3 -
Tried for dual boot ubuntu first time ever, and it was not working because of legacy boot, got tired and just installed ubuntu without realizing that it will fomat the whole disk,
It still hurts4 -
No actual data loss here, but the feeling of data loss.
After having my data scattered across several devices i decided to get a grip on it use a cloud. I'm too paranoid for a real cloud so i used a local nextcloud installation. That was done via docker and with a 2TB raid1-array.
I noticed that after restarting the server the cloud was somehow reset and pointed me to the setup-page, afterwards my files were already there. It did strike me as odd but i figured "maybe don't restart the server in the next time".
But i did restart it. And this time i had to setup the cloud again, but my files were gone. I got close to a heart attack, even though all those files weren't that valuable. I ripped one disk from the usb hub, connected it to my laptop and tried to mount it, but raid array. Instead i started photorec and recovered a bunch of files, even though their names were some random hex and i knew i'd spend my next weeks sorting my files. While photorec ran i inspected the docker container and saw that there were only 10GB of space available. After a while and one final df i found the culprit: the raid. For some reason the raid wasn't mounted at boot and docker created the volumes on the servers hard disk, same goes for the container data. After re-adding the disk to the hub i mounted the raid and inspected everything again. All my files were still there.
At no point did i lose my data, but the thought was shocking enough. It'd be best not to fiddle with this server in the next time. -
Well it's about my B.Tech project.
I had windows 7 and I had lots of imp data along with my project and I hadn't taken any backup of my project(not even report copy). So after successful completion of my project I thought let's play with OS and try other OS and that time I had rare awareness about data and OS too.
So I had copied my imp data(mainly friends party pics) into my friend's external HDD and I thought yeah I have clean chit now and literally I forgot about my project which was in C:/ drive.
So happily I had done experiments and enjoyed a lot and one day my my project partner asked about project copy and I had just given a smile.
RIP.
Happy Ending :D1 -
Started out as an intern at my current employer, after a few months they made me create an invoicing system...
I should have said no.
I've had a lot of bugs with it in the past, but the data-loss one has been because I send a SOAP call to our (third party) accounting system and only if I get an ERROR do I log it....
Apparently, when you put line 1 before line 0, you get a warning, but no data is processed...
Had to write a script that updated 4 months of invoice data in one go, without errors, took me a fucking week...
Lesson learnt boys and girls, never let an intern make the fucking invoicing system!3 -
I nearly lost all pictures I had saved of my waifu because I was using an external HD at the time that I used on both Mac and Windows. I had a temp folder on my Mac that I saved into whenever I was traveling. It piled up, so I figured it was time to merge the folders by dragging the folder from my Mac to the external HD (they had the same folder name).
The only problem was.... Mac does not merge folders. It overwrote it. I cried, freaked out, asked every tech friend I could for help, and I nearly lost everything, but I made sure to not shut the drive off. A few hours later, I plugged it into Windows, and Recuva to the rescue!
So while it was a happy ending, that was a HUGE scare for me.3 -
Using a raw vmdk on windows and not knowing that after reboot windows decided to reorder my drive numbers. Then proceed to install a Linux onto an other hdd deleting the partition table and many things. Happily vbox crashed before it wrote a lot then I realized that my drive is not there anymore. Anyway photorec saved my life. I survived without any major losses.
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Well not actually a "loss" but in my previous class, a year ago, I've lost one of my USB-Sticks.
And suddenly, a year later, some random teacher got into class and asked for my name, then gave me my USB-Stick back! After one year!
I didn't remember the stick in the first place but then I realized it was the one I've lost!
Btw it was a 2GB one, with just a few files on it... -
Me being the dumbass I was when I was younger, I decided it was a wonderful idea to record fucking Spongebob over my parents wedding... I’m still pissed with my self 10 years later. (This was on a VHS, in case you were wondering)
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(a slide acoustic guitar plays on the background and the cowboy starts speaking)
It was a dry october day, back in good old 2017. I had this job from a client that I never met and was doing some coding for money.
After days of no sleep, no food and no rest, I finally decided to take a nap so I paused my music.
It was at this moment I found out my machine was making funny noises. Like a dingo makin' a run from it's enemies with a whelping noise.
Clicked on my computer and tried to find an ol' file from the archive drive but the machine won't let me, sayin' the disk ain't ready yet.
I tried disk manager, disk scanner, whatever the tools at my disposal all in vain. Then I said what the hell, I'll just restart my machine and it'll be alright.
The machine rebooted but the disk was gone. It was dead like a deer I ran over. I was upset, but not aware of the calamity headin' my way.
In just a few days my other 2 disks died suddenly. The loss of data, all the effort, none of them mattered. I felt numb and decided it was time for a fresh start.
Plugged in a Windows install disk, started the sequence, a screen came up askin' me which damned and alive disk I wanna install the fresh OS. I had two same make and model SSD disks, chose the one thinkin' it was the Windows drive, hell it wasnt... It was with all "my documents", "downloads", "pictures" folders and now I had two SSD drives with two Windows installations and nothing else.
The folks in town took a dab at me for months, even the bartender of the salloon refused to give me a drink. Sayin' it was a matter of reputation...
Turned out the bastard who fried my disks was the Madde Dog PSU Tannen who had a bad temper so here I am, tellin' my story to milk breathers and cherishing old days of data...3 -
In a similar vein to @Awlex's story, I lost 800GB of anime in a disk head crash. To this day, I have no idea how it happened.
We were getting our house painted and so my anime hard drive was left untouched for about a month, and then when I tried to connect it I found the disk head had crashed.
And then, a second time when I had managed to amass another 400GB of anime and something went wrong while I was trying to delete some other folders through Ubuntu's GUI (yeah, I know) and my anime folder was accidentally shift-deleted. T-T
Now my collection is back up at 300GB and I only use command-line to delete multiple folders now. -
Not a data loss exactly but a loss indeed.
It was my first week at my first junior developer job, I was just learning git and completely messed it all up. I lost around 3 hours of work.
I didn't want to ask anybody for help (because of that useless junior feeling, you know...) and wasn't as good using Google as I'm now.
So I re-did all the work. Thankfully, I have a decent memory.
If there's something to learn here is ask for help when you've used all your resources and still think you need it. Nobody is going to have a bad opinion about you ;) -
Fun story:
I once was in some kind of SSH-ception, my machine and two remote machines where the same, as in the username and hostname (local name) where equal. All with and Hitachi 500 GB disk.
I was going to nuke the remote machine 1, so later that day I would rebuild the system and all that good stuff, so it would be equal to remote machine 2.
I check the disks and see that it is what I expected, and proceed with the so called "sudo rm -rf /".
Turns out, in my madness, I was doing this on the remote machine 2, not on remote machine 1 (too many terminals), and after I pressed the button and 5 minutes are passed, I realize my mistake...I had just killed a big part of some research I was doing for college (100 or so simulation files, 2GB each).
LESSON: Always triple check your drives and sessions.
P.S.: Something similar happened with me once doing dd to make a ubuntu bootable flash, I ended up erasing 800GB of backup files. -
We were already running a few hours behind the official release time for this brand new game we had been developing when one of my coworkers became unwell.
We switched on the games translation system and it turns out that every line of dialog had been deleted and replaced with it's ID... Took us a few hours to recover the existing dialog before we could release. One of the worst situations I've been in... -
Back in 2005, I had quite a few bits of music I was working on (just as a hobby). A lot of these had not been finished, but I'd sent excerpts in medium-quality MP3 format to a friend. I had an external backup drive - a regular hard drive in an USB enclosure. After a while, this drive started making unpleasant whining sounds so I sent it off for replacement.
During that time I made the foolish decision to try and plug a floppy drive in while the PC was powered on. Something touched the bottom of the hard drive and the power went off. I powered it back on again and heard a fizzing sound, there were some flashes from the hard drive and a burning smell. Yep, the disk was dead - and my backup drive was gone.
I'm still not entirely sure what happened, my best guess is that I had an exposed piece of wire from one of my hacky case mods (I had a thing for blue LEDs) which touched the circuitry of the hard drive. Almost every project, piece of software I'd created, every photo I'd taken, and most unfinished music I'd made up until that point - gone. I was pretty devastated about it. I only had a handful of things survived which I'd burned onto CD previously.
I managed to get some excerpts back from my friend, and re-created my favourite pieces of music based on those. I've moved on to other projects and write much better code now, so mostly I am no longer bothered. I do wish I could re-listen to some of the music I had made back then though.
Needless to say, I no longer fiddle around with the innards of my computers while they are on, store everything on mirrored drives and also ensure I always have a backup somewhere (and am working on remote backups and having several days of backups...)
I never want that to happen again -
>Weird Windows 10 glitch occurs causing text in dialogue boxes and other various things to not appear until you restart your computer.
>Is working on a program in C#
>Presses button in source control.
>Yes or no dialogue appears.
>Presses yes.
>All flies in working folder disappear.
>Restarts computer to fix visual glitch.
>All files in working folder don’t actually exist anymore.
>3 months of work nowhere to be found.
>Downloads decompiler.
>Decompiles previous versions executable file.
>Continues to work on project with decompiled code for the next 6 months.
>Gets sick of everything and painfully rewrites the entire program in NodeJS.
Moral of the story: Never gamble with Windows.4 -
First year on the job. Was already good at writing software, but bad at practices and administration. One such software was being tested live, while still in development. I was developing on the production database... .
Yeah.
I was working on an edit feature of sales records, in a table that already contained hundreds of subsidized sales of very expensive products. Based on that, the supplier had to compensate the shops with half the price of every item.
I forgot to add a where clause to the update. Lost all sales data. On production.
Asked the admin if there are backups and he says yes, checks to discover that the backup script failed for the last week (since it became live)
Whole thing was incredibly stupid. I made a ton of stupid mistakes, and so did the other people involved. The loss was around 1 year of my income. Luckily the client decided to brush it off as losses and claim some tax benefits and it all ended well.1 -
Witchcraft is what windows update is. Turned my C:\ drive partition to RAW during an upgrade. I had to start over, no files...nothing. I was shaved bald. It was a sad night.
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Ended up dong an internship for my school (not really internship, more along the lines of formal volunteering, but whatever) helping set up laptops for a statewide standardized assessment.
I made a program to log the machine's identifying info (Serial, MAC addresses, etc), renames it, joins it to the school's Active Directory, and takes notes on machines, which gets dumped into a csv file.
Made the classic rookie mistake of backing things up occasionally, but not often enough. Accidentally nuked the flash drive with the data on it, and spent a good while learning data recovery and how grep works.
Lesson Learned? Back up frequently and back up everything -
in morning ...
SELECT *
FROM some_fucking_40_mil_records_view
where rownum < 6;
Still crying about the slow internet connection ... -
Used Momentum to-do lists for money-tracking - who owns me how much for which project etc. Well from time to time Momentum just completely erases them. This was painful.
Momentum is really good extension but I still do not get it why it asks for email and password in the first place when it actually does not save anything in cloud. -
High school, prepping to go to class, I take a book that I needed for class, while picking it up from the book shelf the latin vocabulary fell and landed on my hard drive which was on top of my MacBook, two birds with one stone :(
I now have three different external hard drives and planning to get an off-site solution as well. -
That day when I destroyed the hard drive of my mother's PC when I was 12 years old. (The drive wasn't properly screwed in the case, and so after a few repositions of the case, it would one day start up sounding like a jet engine and after that scary sound: silence.
My mother took it relatively well, mostly because she saw how I was beating myself up over it. I was so mad at myself as I knew better! I knew how to create a backup strategy, I'm theory. I never really put in into practice though.
She had no backups of course. No way of regaining her data.
Now she does. And now she regularly calls me to initialize a backup of her current data on her external drive. (And every few months I sync her data over to my place on a data storage just in case she loses both her PC and external drive in a fire.) -
I had a 1Tb external hard drive on the corner of desk (My fault, i know, but at that time i didn't have a lot of space), i used it to keep mostly unimportant things like game files, VMs, movies and stuff like that. Once i was streaming a movie from the pc to the tv in the other room, suddently the tv disconnected, i went to the pc room to check, and i found out that the evil monster that lived in my house (the cat) dropped it off the desk.
The hard disk died and brought all its files with it, luckly i had backups for most of the important files, but i had to download again around 300GB of stuff.... with my slow internet. -
Enabled a mysql optimization once, corrupted the whole live DB on a sunday while I was an hour away from the nearest internet connection.....
Luckily we had a live replication server so not much was lost (though uploading it over a 14mbit connection takes a long time for 30GB) -
TL:DR; Samsung pc to phone app was shit.
So samsung last time had an app that links music, etc from folder directly which means it doesnt copy but uses those files unlike itunes which was to navigate, but thats another thing altogether
I wanted to delete some music files from the app. I checked and checked and checked.. and I fucked up. I deleted the entire 4gb of music in my folder.
Everything gone. I tried recovering them after 1 hr, they were all corrupted.
I had back up but they were only 1gb of everything :(2 -
Was about 13-14 years old, on my first laptop, a HP Pavilion G6. I had Ubuntu on it, and tried to write an iso to a USB with dd. Didn't work, so I forgot about it for up to maybe a week, and was playing Minecraft one day when my laptop froze and nothing was responding, so I did a hard reboot.
No operating systems found.
Many tears were shed that day.
Took me maybe 6 months to realize that the "botched" dd probably caused the wipe.
Still don't know why my computer was still running... If anyone thinks that the dd didn't cause it I'm curious what your theory is.4 -
About a year ago when I started at my apprenticeship I was asked to turn on the plugins for our ecommerce websites... I clicked uploaded price on the 3 websites and 2 ebay stores by accident.... That took a week of going though and changing all the prices back to what they should have been
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Fellow Spanish-speaking developer:
https://youtu.be/i_cVJgIz_Cs
Don't forget the WHERE in the DELETE statement. -
!dev but a parable
I worked at a Walmart Photo Lab with a Fujifilm photo processor. I had a guy ask for his pictures but they weren’t printed, I could see his order but there was no “payload” ( think PO header with no PO lines). He said he ordered 600+ pictures off his SD card, then blew them away because they were ordered.
As I had no physical pictures, there was nothing I could do but say “sorry”. He was mad, but there was nothing I could do.
Moral of the story, verify backups before wiping the system. -
Yo, i heard that it's easier to find jobs in web / software development in UK , is that true? 🤔 whos from uk?8
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Been studying web dev for about 10 months everyday and night and wanted to know when people usually look for they’re first job? I live in Asia right now and would be willing to move back to California or anywhere in the world to get started. What would you guys do freelance, search for jobs overseas, go to Silicon Valley “I’m from the Bay Area” but have been overseas for the past 6 years. Let me know thanks devs1
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