One line of Code Burns His Company

[Geek-9pm]

One Man, One line of Code Burns Entire  Company.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/man-accidentally-deletes-his-entire-company-with-one-line-of-bad-code-a6984256.html

By accidentally telling his computer to delete everything in his servers, hosting provider Marco Marsala has seemingly removed all trace of his company and the websites that he looks after for his customers.

 

[DaveLembke]

Guy is an idiot.

Back up media mounted when running this script and no backups elsewhere = stupid

When I was system admin at my prior job we had RAID5 plus Daily, Weekly, and Monthly backups.

The daily backups were overwritten every 7th day.
The weekly backups were overwritten once every month.
The monthly backups became a hard copy of the data to be retained and never overwritten ever again and placed into a safe.

We had failures a few times with the RAID 5 breaking and I had to rebuild the RAID array and push the prior days backup to rebuilding the data to the RAID.

*Given what this guy had for a company and clients content, it sounds like he skimped on a proper setup for multiple parachutes in place when the single backup plan fails. Reading this initially my thoughts were did this guy run a business with absolutely NO backup plan. In this case if this story is true he had the backup plan, but it was weak.

Its playing with fire to only have a single backup plan as for if a viral attack got in, and drives mounted he would have corrupted, infected the backup too. A business to the scale of what he "once had" should have had daily, weekly, and monthly backups in which there are multiple restore points to not lose everything, and if there is an infection that is discovered after mounting a backup media, you can deal with the infection and then go back further to where the infection is missing or if yesterdays data is destroyed, go back 2 days with virus taken care of and restore likely more than 99% of the data lost.

[patio]

I feel bad for him....Not.

[Salmon Trout]

The original Serverfault story has been taken down. Now known to be fake. The author has released a statement about it being a "viral marketing campaign" for his startup.

[Salmon Trout]

This was heavily demolished on Slashdot.

[DaveLembke]

Thanks Salmon for pointing out that this is fake. I had serious doubts, however it seems that with all the poorly IT/MIS managed businesses out there its not at all impossible for someone to lose their company in such a way as was suggested.

In this case if this story is true he had the backup plan, but it was weak.

I know of one business owner that had a video store that he use to use a ZIP drive to backup his business daily around 2004 that lost all his data for example. He ran the backup daily to the same ZIP drive tape. Never a rotational backup, always risking losing it all. He felt safe because he was after all doing a backup. He read enough online in how to perform the backup and so he did. However he didnt Verify the data that was being backed up after the data was copied to make sure that the backup was successful. Simply when it ended all was well he thought. However when his video store point of sale system crashed and he reloaded the point of sale video store program back onto the computer that was running Windows 98 and then went to recover his data from the ZIP drive. It failed to read the ZIP drive. The data there was corrupt. He contacted me for help. My initial question was ok, so you have this backup tape for the iomega ZIP drive, where are your other tapes so we can try going back to a day prior. He said thats the only tape, he never bought any other tapes, never created a second copy. Inspection of the ZIP drive tape looked like the tape was heavily worn. Small scratches on the tape surface as it was run in a non serviced point of sale system that the dust and dirt would rub against the magnetic tape. He was in a situation to where he could have put himself out of business.

He ended up having to recatalog into the system his entire video store all over again. People returning movies he had no clue if they owed late fees and so he couldnt charge for late fees. People could have if they known that his data was gone kept the movies and he would never know who had what movie. I worked with him to help him repopulate the database and then I got him onto a 7 day rolling backup as well as once a month he back up the system and save the monthly backup off site at home.

The mistake cost him a lot, and fortunately his video store only had about 1400 movies and the point of sale system was not too bad to enter movie titles and scan the barcode to associate the movie title with the barcode for each one for checking in and out movies. As well as repopulate snacks and other stuff he sold there like 3D glasses etc. In the end it likely cost him a few thousand dollars for that mistake.

[patio]

The CH News Editor position is still taking applications...

[Salmon Trout]

New Slashdot story
https://developers.slashdot.org/story/16/04/16/1646212/that-man-who-deleted-his-entire-company-with-a-line-of-code-it-was-a-hoax?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29

[Geek-9pm]

Tanks to Salmon Trout.
The story has been removed  from a forum that had it. It was said to be a kind of publicity stunt to promote something.

[Salmon Trout]

A PCWorld post contains this sentence: "The most surprising thing might be that so many people believed him, including those on a forum for technology experts."