My Dad worked for a small town and they needed a billing system for water and electricity in the early 90s. He learned C and wrote the entire billing system from scratch. It looked and worked amazing for a dos program of the time. After he passed away in 2021 they got new computers and ended up getting a new billing software and his software was never saved anywhere :(
Ask HN: What did you lose forever because you had no backup?
11–17 of 17 posts
Re: Ask HN: What did you lose forever because you had no backup?
#12My old Twitter account: posts/following/followers. Not long before Elon Musk took over the company, I was prompted for my age in the app. I decided to comply and got banned. Apparently I was less than 13 years old when I created the account, and they retroactively ban for that. Mind you there was no law in my jurisdiction about using social media at a young age, at the time. Still sad about that.
Re: Ask HN: What did you lose forever because you had no backup?
#13Several Bitcoin I had earned by mining as a stability test. I could have skipped the rat race and kept my soul... if only teenage-me wasn't astronomically stupid and unlucky
Re: Ask HN: What did you lose forever because you had no backup?
#14My Yahoo Mail since I was a kid.
Didn’t log in to it for some years and when I did it was all gone.
On one hand I’m kinda glad because I realized all this digital shit is just temporary.
Our human memories are forever.
Re: Ask HN: What did you lose forever because you had no backup?
#15My Yahoo Mail since I was a kid. Didn’t log in to it for some years and when I did it was all gone. On one hand I’m kinda glad because I realized all this digital shit is just temporary. Our human memories are forever.
Idk I've forgotten a lot.
Re: Ask HN: What did you lose forever because you had no backup?
#16I lost all my college projects due to source forge bullshit decades ago. And old pictures from digital/film cameras. Right now, I run both google/apple photos so I have 2 backups of my pics and videos.
Honestly, after 20 some years in technology, I don't think it's possible to back up everything unless you are willing to pay and constantly work at it.
Re: Ask HN: What did you lose forever because you had no backup?
#17Early in my career I was given the task of writing a simple code generator: read some simple strucured text file and write a file containing C++ classes with get and set methods. Pretty simple.
I worked on it all day, then tried running it - whereupon my choice of default output filename (main.cpp) caused it to overwrite its own source code. There were no backup copies.
I told no-one, stayed late to re-write it, and demo-ed it the next day. I like to think I learned some kind of lesson, but I'm not entirely sure what.