There are worse stories on the web describing identity theft, long term projects falling ill to crashing servers or hard drives, or simply having one's computer stolen, but my horror story was due to simple negligence, and luckily there was protocols to prevent this exact thing that happened to save me.
Last year, I was working as a researcher for a bit in my first year of graduate school in an astronomy graduate program out West in the Pacific. We did most of our work "offsite" meaning that we used a secure method to log into an external server which was located only a few rooms over. All of our data was stored there, all of my work and code I had been using sat in folders on this server, and simply with a few strokes of the keyboard my entire work directly was wiped clean.
I was attempted to delete a bunch of files ending with a similar ending grouping of letters, so I typed into the terminal rm * and pressed enter by accident! For those who are unfamiliar with linux, this will remove all of the files in your directory. The * represents anything leading up to the star, and some text followed by a star means any files or folders beginning with what you wrote. A plain * star however removes everything! Somehow, there was a script, or so I think, which actually copies all of the files first into a temporary folder in case you didn't mean to do this.
Of course my head wasn't so level at the moment I noticed what I had done, and my first reaction was to jump on the phone to a friend who understood linux far better than I. While talking to him I noticed this mystery folder and found all of my files tucked into it. I carefully copied them all into the main folder they used to be, and avoided a huge catastrophe. I had at least 3 months of work in those folders, and while most of it could have been done in a few weeks since the stumbling blocks had been passed, my heart would have sank to have to fallen so far behind.
A lesson without a terrible outcome was learned. Back up your data!
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