So there I was, leaving work on a Friday for a week-long respite from the rat race (haha!) and I was faced with cleaning up and saving work I had just slaved over.  I finally had my app doing what I wanted, and I was working on making it look pretty, and I was also faced with rushing out to meet up with someone for a few pints.  Well, the one thing I DIDN'T do was a git push - even though I looked at it for a while before I left and thought about it.   Well, for some reason the git plugin in Eclipse didn't remember my remotes, and so I would have to enter all the remote data by hand.  I gave it a pass, hit Hibernate, and ran off for fun in the sun. 

 

Go figure, when I returned to work this past Monday, my hard drive was dead.  I had all of my email saved on either the Exchange server or the network home drive, some of my data on Dropbox (safe) - but my project was toast - no backup of the machine itself.  For a simple little operation, I could have saved myself a weeks worth of rework.  Working git-remotes and a simple git-push - all that would have saved me. 

 

I'm not a newbie to data loss prevention - in a previous job I mastered it as the network backup admin. We never lost data under my reign as master of NetBackup (Shudder).  But yet as a user I still fall prey to assuming that my technology is 100% reliable. While this isn't a travesty, this was only a hobby project mind you, it's a good reminder that one can never be too vigilant about their data, and that with a tool like git, where backup is almost TOO easy, it behooves one to make sure one uses those features as often as possible. 


 

Lesson learned.