So, I knew that this day was coming. I was trying to deploy some Ruby on Rails applications on my hosted website. Needless to say, things were not going that well, and I was running into continual issues with the deployment.

In an attempt to start over, it was necessary to clean up some files. So from the command line of my shell I executed:

[jwfoxjr@xxxxxxxx ~]$ rm -rvf *

(You really didn’t think I was going to give you me hostname did you?)

As all the files from my home directory (including the files that this site run on) I realize what I’ve done. I’m frantically stabbing Ctrl-C on the keyboard, but the damage was already done.

Suffice it to say, $15.00 dollars later, and 8 hour wait, and then a day of coding, I was able to get everything back, and the new sites that I was working on originally working.

Moral of the story? Even experienced administrators make mistakes. Always make sure you have a backup of your own, that way you don’t have to wait on others to restore one for you.