Was randomly thinking about this this morning. What's the biggest/most important thing you ever lost due to accidental deletion, a hard drive failure, or deliberate wiping and then regretting it later?
For me, professionally, it was 1Tb of data sitting on a development environment. Fortunately it was not my fault, even though I pushed the button. The server was unlabelled. I was under strict instructions to wipe 'the unlabelled black HP server'. Unfortunately, there were two unlabelled black HP servers, and I spotted the wrong one first. Oops.
Personally, I've been pretty lucky. Although last year I forgot to back up my Stormworks saved game before reinstalling Windows and lost about four hundred hours of work on my ship. That shit had hand-coded autonomous piloting and a fully operational 3d gimball hot seat/screen that linked to a deployable ocean probe via wireless. When the probe bobbed and rolled, you bobbed and rolled. I'm probably never gonna invest the time to re-create that. RIP HMS Janky
Also I'm not sure if the Q3 Map Archive is lost or not, gonna check when I get home in a few days. It should be sitting on a HDD but now I'm not so sure :paranoid:
Last edited by Foo on Sat Aug 27, 2022 9:32 am, edited 2 times in total.
My most serious one is still hard to talk about now, as while I know that it wasn't completely my fault, it still feels bad, and it resulted in a customer's company folding.
It was at a small, NOHO (north of Oxford Street) post production company. The company I worked for at the time provided their equipment and support, and we'd sold them a fibre-attached SAN solution that we knew had had problems with SATA cards in the past.
I think it was at least 32TB, and was about a third full.
They'd shot a bunch of stuff on an oil tanker, the estimated value of which was around £250K. Needless to say, to reshoot it would be impossible.
The storage had been playing up, with media playback stuttering and becoming unavailable, and this was back in the days when we had no way available to us to back up such a large amount of storage.
I was tasked with creating a new "workspace" (a virtual drive) on the storage, and then moving media from the old workspace to the new one.
I duly did this and tested both workspaces before deleting the old one. The media was still online, so I rebooted the storage.
Whereupon, the new workspace disappeared.
It wasn't recoverable at all.
Almost lost my job over that one, but I think my boss realised that he was ultimately to blame, having sent me on site with no form of back-up.
On a less serious note, I had a similar experience a few years before, but in much more jovial circumstances, and the customer was definitely to blame.
When I was working in Bristol, my company supported a porn production company. They'd filled up the drives connected to one of their edit suites, and I was freeing up space for them.
As this was a few years earlier than the event outlined above, these were locally attached SCSI drives. Shared network storage was available at the time, but was biblically expensive, and out of reach of most small to medium post houses.
It was all fun and games watching various jiggly bits on the screen, up until I asked:
"Am I okay to delete this media?"
The customer replied that I was.
I asked them twice more to be sure.
They replied in the positive both times.
I deleted the media, only for the boobs to disappear from the screen and be replaced by the "Media Offline" placeholder.
Never have I gone from jocularity to cold sweats so fast.
Thankfully, this was back in the days of tape, so they just had to re-capture, and they couldn't deny that it was their fault.
As I've gotten older, I know that these experiences have ultimately made me better at my job, and I don't trust anyone technical who says they've never fucked up.
The main lesson I've taken away from both of those situations is that if I am not directly responsible for files, I will not delete anything. I'll tell the customer how to do it, then let them hang themselves.
Oh, and of course, the old perennial "If it ain't backed up, it ain't important".
Professionally I never deleted anything critical or unrecoverable. The most annoying one was where I worked at this small company that had a single dev database where every developer's runtime environment hooked into. I never understood why it was done this way as it meant a DB change by developer A could potentially break developer B's environment. But anyway, I accidentally deleted a significant portion of this DB which meant all developers couldn't continue working. The DB could be restored from the backup, but that day our (only) sysadmin had a day off and no one really had an idea how the backup was set up. Luckily it was 4pm or so and my manager decided to just call it quits for that day and go get ice cream for everyone instead. Guess who had to "volunteer" to get and pay for it
Personally, I had a HDD die on me once. I didn't have backups of anything. I lost some holiday photos and the source code to all of my personal programming projects, including the Quake Toolkit and the .map files of some quake3 maps I had made. Oh, and my fine tuned q3config.cfg
I've actually never lost anything. I've had hard drives die on me a few times but I'm pretty good at data recovery so it wasn't a big deal aside from the time it took to recover the data. I do this for clients as well. If you've lost valuable data, find an IT person, you'll be surprised with what they can recover sometimes.
I do worry about this all the time as I've been horrible about backing up and organizing over a decade of family photos since my son was born. I think I have everything on at least two separate physical drives and am working on slowly getting things uploaded to cloud backup, but its a slow and unorganized process.
I consider myself lucky reading the above, never really lost anything of value* and will say, " ..must be time to back up stuff...". I just added it to my 'to do' list
Strangely, I do keep emails I think 'worth keeping' and I will do a search later to seek out the oldest
Same here, Whiskey, I'm lucky compared to some of these guys. I lost some files to a corrupted hard drive once and my most recent backup was 6 months old, so that was hard to recover from. But I haven't lost anything devastating. :paranoid:
I've accidentally deleted partition on my backups external hard drive, where I had not only files backed up from my internal hard drive to free up storage for defragmentation, but also my personal photos and videos - defragmentation didn't help much, so I ended up transferring the entire disk to SSD and replacing the internal HDD with that SSD - bear in mind it was 1TB worth of storage, and SSD has 2TB, which means I was able to create a separate partition and transfer some games and stuff to the new partition - so due to the sheer size, it was quite painfully slow, and I got bored, so I plugged my external hard drive with backups to my other computer and started fiddling with the partitions. It was a repurposed internal HDD from my old laptop, and I didn't bother to remove the unnecessary system partitions that were still on the disk before it was first used as an external HDD. I thought that removing those partition wouldn't do anything. Oh boy, was I wrong. So I accidentally removed access to the main partition that had my backups on it, and I panicked. So I removed the last partition and started improvising. Created new one, and tried to undelete the files, but all it found was mess. So I figured out I need to reinstate the partitions like it was before. So that disk had not been written on it just yet, so the data are still there, presumably entirely intact, but I need to figure out how to get them out. One option would be to pay for one month of license to Partition Wizard to recover the drive and its data. Right now, I lost access to my backups and my photos and videos, and my video editing toolkit, complete with my music library. Lesson learned, do not fiddle with partitions with data on it. Always make sure you have a backup. What I could have done while waiting for the HDD to SSD transfer to complete is watch YouTube, that would be safe.
Last edited by CZghost on Thu Sep 08, 2022 7:32 am, edited 1 time in total.
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“When you feel the worst, turn to the sun and all the shadows will fall behind you.” - John Lennon
Mat Linnett wrote:Oh, and of course, the old perennial "If it ain't backed up, it ain't important".
This reminds me of this one time where I had to go to a customer to update their test environment of our software. To update, I had to temporarily stop the IIS service. While I was working on this, someone came barging into the room being all panicky asking what had happened to their GIS server. I said I didn't know because I was only working on the CMS test server. The guy asked me what server that was and I told him and then he went "OH NO!" and it turned out that this was the same server where they had their GIS production environment running. No one had told me and while I know assumptions are the mother of all fuckups, I deemed it safe to assume that a server running a testing environment for our software wouldn't also run the production environment of organization critical software :dork:
The SCSI-HD in my Yamaha hardware sampler died around 2005.
That was tragedy. Lots of recorded material on that one. No backup on the PC. I was able to recover some but most was gone.
I've never lost anything on a PC's HD or SSD though. And I didn't even raid or paid much attention. Guess I am a lucky one.
