Recently I had the misfortune of losing months of precious work. This blog post is about my unlucky experience of loosing data. Hopefully it reminds the I.T people who read this article about the importance of a good backup. While working for a client I deleted some important files by mistake, and guess what there was no backup !. Well there was a backup but it was 2 months old. At least all was not lost.
It happened while I was managing a Linux based server for a client. I entered the normal rm * -rf command, but from within the wrong directory!. That got me in a panic. I searched the internet for data recovery solutions but could not find one that could be used.
I only had SSH access to the server and could not unmount the disk that had the missing data. Thankfully I had an old backup. I thought my client would be angry at me, but strangely, he also had problems with his data backup. So he was understanding and considerate about the whole issue.
Even the most skilled I.T workers can make mistakes. A good secure backup is essential in any I.T environment. Its easy to get distracted and loose precious data by mistake. My advice is to have a good backup before starting work!.