So a few days ago, I’m getting ready to reinstall my PC and the hard disk in our FreeBSD router that I’m using for storage turns out to be full – so I’m cleaning things up in it, for example there’s the remnants of an old filesystem from when the big drive used to be a boot drive…
… and I managed to erase all of /usr/local on the router somehow. That’s not a huge deal, it’s mostly configurations and such and all our assorted ports tree – all the important shit like the UPNP daemon are all still running (just gotta hope the UPS keeps it up until I get around to reinstalling and reconfiguring it), but it’s still a bit of a pain in the butt.
So the actual reinstall of my desktop took place mostly without a hitch, but then I realized that in my haste I’d somehow managed to neglect backing up my Quicken data file. We have a “backup” of it, but that’s about 2 weeks old and next to useless, so I’m rebuilding the entire thing from the 1st of the year (so we’ll know about where we stand with taxes and such), and it’s proving to be tedious.
So in a matter of a couple of days, I’ve managed to erase data on two separate occasions. Thankfully I haven’t been poking around any of our production servers (though that stuff is all backed up daily), and at least it’s not one of those jobs in healthcare where I just blew away some cancer patient’s medical records or something.
Needless to say I’m being very careful when I’m poking around as root on servers now, I’m making sure all my backups are up to date, and I’m trying not to tear my hair out reconciling 9 months worth of Quicken data. 