You’re probably an idiot. A lot of people are, me included. When did you last do a backup? You don’t have one? Well, neither did I. If you have ever visited my virtually never updated blog you’ll probably see some posts missing. Not that there actually were a lot to look at anyway. Three posts, and two of them were mostly uninteresting, to be honest. My SVN repositories are gone as well, but I had the ones I cared about checked out on my computer anyway. Of course I’ll lose the revision log and rollback capability, but at least I have the latest revision available. Another loss was my folder of funny and witty pictures. That folder was nothing short of pure awesomeness. I can probably just rip them off someone again. They weren’t “mine” anyway.
How did this happen? My VPS provider ran some control panel management software of some sort called HyperVM developed by some company called LxLabs. Apparently this piece is software is a piece of shit and had numerous fatal security vulnerabilities. Someone found it incredibly amusing to exploit one of these holes and wipe hundreds and thousands of VEs resulting considerate downtime on quite a lot of websites having complete data loss, and even more being down for a long time. My stuff was mostly personal crap, but other people, fellow idiots, actually had important data and had customers’ data. All gone, forever and entirely irreversible. While following the situation I saw some people getting increasingly frustrated. Customers complaining, demanding refunds, etc. Customers calling to ask “where the fuck is my shit?” These are of course bigger idiots than I am. They lost important, “mission critical” crap, I lost private and largely unimportant crap.
It’s actually something I see a lot. Many people seem to put blind faith in the integrity of their data, even if it’s very important and valuable data. Of course their shit won’t get lost/burnt/broken/stolen/whatever — only the neighbor’s will. Sometimes it turns out to be different. I’ve seen people lose USB sticks with allegedly super important data. Some were fortunate enough to find it again, others weren’t.
I suppose the lesson is hope for the best, plan for the worst. Don’t be an idiot, backup your data!