I’m aware, but thank you. This post was intended to be a guide for people that end up in this situation.

I’m aware. The post was simply to get a recovery guide out there for a crappy situation.

This happened a while ago and I’m well past it. The point of the post was to help others that ended up in the situation, not sell best practices.

My thoughts on the same quote FTA:

As I understand it, I agree with your concern that China probably shouldn’t gain anymore strength in trade than they possess already, because they’ll eventually pull the same garbage the U.S. does today, almost certainly. However, the poetic justice of defeating tariffs through public investment is a little bit of a consolation prize, as least ideologically.

I’m not firm in my stance so if you disagree or think I’m missing something, please feel free to discuss with earnest :)

100% my stack going forward. Thanks!

That’s the move.

I’m aware. Any local storage wouldn’t do much about a poorly aimed rm, though.

Disturbingly effective is definitely the right phrase. It’s actually inspired me to create a script on my desktop that moves folders to ~/Trash, then I have another script that /dev/random’s the files and then /dev/zeros them before deletion. It eliminated risk of an accidental rm, AND make sure that once something is gone, it is GONE.

The server we were working at the time wasn’t configured with frequent backups, just a full backup once a month as a stop gap until the project got some proper funding. Any sort of remote version control is totally the preventative factor here, but my goal is to help others that have yet to learn that lesson.

As others pointed out, version control is probably the best fix for this in addition to traditional backups. My goal in this post was to help others that have yet to learn responsibility save their ass and maybe learn their lesson in a less pleasant way.

100%. The organization wasn’t there yet and seeing that I wanted to remain employed at the time I wasn’t going to put up a fight against management 3 layers above me. Legacy business are a different beast when it comes to dumb stuff like that.

I’m not denying that stupid stuff didn’t happen nor that this wasn’t entirely preventable. There’s some practical reasons that are unique to large, slow moving orgs that explain why it wasn’t (yet) in version control.