# Oopsie
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oopsie/752240
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
**Created:** [April 15, 2016, 2:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oopsie/752240 "2016-04-15T02:08:25Z")
**Posts on this page:** 10
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Cabin\_Fever\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cabin_Fever_1)
#### Post date: [April 15, 2016, 2:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oopsie/752240/1 "2016-04-15T02:08:25Z")
I normally don’t chuckle or laugh at other peoples mistakes or misfortunes, but upon reading this I made an exception.
“A man has managed to delete his entire company after accidentally running a command on his servers. The command removed every file stored on the servers that previously held customer websites the company was responsible for hosting.”
[Story here.](http://www.businessinsider.com/a-man-deleted-his-entire-company-with-one-line-of-code-2016-4)
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### Author:  [@Cabin\_Fever\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cabin_Fever_1)
#### Post date: [April 15, 2016, 2:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oopsie/752240/2 "2016-04-15T02:15:31Z")
[Original discussion.](http://serverfault.com/questions/769357/recovering-from-a-rm-rf)
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### Author:  [@Senegoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Senegoid)
#### Post date: [April 15, 2016, 3:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oopsie/752240/3 "2016-04-15T03:18:07Z")
[We had that happen here too.](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=790365)
(Yes, that rm -rf is mentioned in that thread too, in Post #7 et seq.)
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### Author:  [@Cabin\_Fever\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cabin_Fever_1)
#### Post date: [April 15, 2016, 12:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oopsie/752240/4 "2016-04-15T12:07:25Z")
Yes. Did Marley ever get his Goat pin? I have done some silly things in my life, but haven’t qualified myself (yet) for that honor.
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### Author:  [@Sailboat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sailboat)
#### Post date: [April 15, 2016, 1:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oopsie/752240/5 "2016-04-15T13:25:00Z")
The original discussion has been removed from public view…or accidentally deleted, one of the two.
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### Author:  [@Inner\_Stickler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Inner_Stickler)
#### Post date: [April 15, 2016, 3:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oopsie/752240/6 "2016-04-15T15:06:51Z")
[Cached version](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6y3HTYvxTYIJ:serverfault.com/questions/769357/recovering-from-a-rm-rf+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us).
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### Author:  [@Mama\_Zappa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mama_Zappa)
#### Post date: [April 15, 2016, 11:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oopsie/752240/7 "2016-04-15T23:40:47Z")
::::cringe::::
A long time ago, I watched a new and inexperienced DBA trainee do something fairly similar, if not QUITE as devastating.
We’d just completed a major system switchover, and I was the data migration person. During migration testing, I had a script that would reset my test database - clobbering all the tables. With TRUNCATE, not DELETE - so rollback wouldn’t have worked.
A few weeks after we went live, I was in her office chatting - it was my last day on the project. She did something on her computer, I happened to glance at it, and the next thing she (and the other DBA, who knew what he was doing) saw was me gibbering and shrieking KILL IT KILL IT KILL IT!!!
Yeah, for some reason she had be looking at my script (no idea why)… had selected the whole thing… and pasted it into the Oracle command-line window… while logged in as an administrator… to the production machine.
Because I saw this happen, she managed to only wipe HALF the production database. The DBA guy was pretty sanguine - he said “Don’t worry, we can reconstruct it from the logs”.
It took him a while, but he did manage to do so.
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### Author:  [@gotpasswords](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gotpasswords)
#### Post date: [April 15, 2016, 11:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oopsie/752240/8 "2016-04-15T23:59:29Z")
I once had one of those moments where you just feel the blood draining out of your body even though I didn’t do anything other than answer the on-call phone on a Sunday afternoon.
“I killed BoKS!”
\ You what?
“I killed BoKS! I thought I was on a different server, but I was on the master and uninstalled it! It’s all gone and nobody can log in! Should I call Dave?”
YES!
At this point, I think I was only able to gurgle slightly at the thought of a production system managing access privileges on about 700 \*nix servers for six thousand users being annihilated as the master server cluster was reaching out to each server to stop and disable the management system one by one. Sweet mercies of the universe had left one of the primary system engineers logged in at a console session, so Dave was able to run to his office and start recovery from a slave server.
I called my boss to let them know about the potential calamity when the developers in India got to their offices, and then to call the helpdesk to prepare them for thousands of users calling in.
People all too easily forget the concept of “With great power comes great responsibility” even when they log in as (or su to) root.
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### Author:  [@engineer\_comp\_geek](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/engineer_comp_geek)
#### Post date: [April 18, 2016, 4:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oopsie/752240/9 "2016-04-18T16:39:24Z")
It turns out that the story linked to in the OP was a hoax by a guy who is promoting his server management business.
> **[Man Deletes Entire Company with One Line of Code](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/man-deletes-company-code/)**
>
> The hoax was a viral marketing scheme intended to direct traffic to his server management company.
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### Author:  [@gotpasswords](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gotpasswords)
#### Post date: [April 18, 2016, 5:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oopsie/752240/10 "2016-04-18T17:57:56Z")
Makes as much sense as a mobile car detailing service driving around in a dirty truck.
Why would he think claiming to make a bonehead mistake is a good way to promote his business?