Oops!

I know it may sound hard to believe, but yesterday I made a mistake. It wasn't a little mistake either. Then again, it wasn't a tragic mistake. I was working on one of the servers at the office and noticed we are keeping around a bunch of nightly database backups. I was cleaning them out and managed to delete every last one.

If I had been working on Windows or the Mac, restoring the files would have been as easy as going to the trash and pulling the ones I was trying to save. On Linux, a delete (or rm) really is a delete and it is nearly impossible to recover the removed files. Instead I will be forced to restore from a tape backup. That shouldn't be too much of a problem because the backup directory is copied to tape regularly and so the files still exist somewhere. It will just take a bit of work this morning.

I don't often make mistakes like this and will definitely be more careful with the "rm" command in the future. However my mistake now gives us a chance to make sure our backups really are working. If not, then I hope nobody ever needs to go back and look at what is in those old database files.