Man Typed One Line Of Wrong Code Which Resulted in The Deletion of His Entire Company

A man accidently deleted his entire company by typing one line of wrong code. Hosting provider, Marco Marsala while discussing at forum for server experts said that he had accidentally typed a code which had killed his entire details from the server via his personal computer. According to experts, Marsala had accidently wiped out the data of his company including its customers, and there is no method to recover the data.

Man Typed One Line Of Wrong Code Which Resulted in The Deletion of His Entire Company

Marsala had posted query on a forum for server experts namely Server Fault, he posted that his all servers got deleted including offsite backups, and he was seeking help to recover it.

The command which resulted in the deletion of his entire company was “rm-rf”. For reference, ‘rm’ literally means “to remove” whereas “r” means to delete all things within given directory and “f” means “force”. These commands direct the computer to snub the warnings that usually come while deleting files. These codes direct the computer to delete everything, same happened with Marsala.

“I run a small hosting provider with more or less 1535 customers and I use Ansible to automate some operations to be run on all servers. Last night I accidentally ran, on all servers, a Bash script with a rm -rf {foo}/{bar} with those variables undefined due to a bug in the code above this line” posted Marsala.

“All servers got deleted and the offsite backups too because the remote storage was mounted just before by the same script (that is a backup maintenance script)” he posted.

We have mentioned some answers where the users said that there may not be any chance for Marsala to recover the data of his company.

“If you really don’t have any backups I am sorry to say but you just nuked your entire company.” wrote a user namely André Borie.

“You’re going out of business. You don’t need technical advice, you need to call your lawyer”. wrote a user namely Michael Hampton.

“I feel sorry to say that your company is now essentially dead. You might have an extremely slim chance to recover from this if you turn off everything right now and hand your disks over to a reputable data recovery company. This will be extremely expensive and still extremely unlikely to really rescue you, and it will take a lot of time” answered a user namely Sven.

This shows how the single line code of code resulted in the deletion of entire company, even that code managed to delete backup from his computer.