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Developer accidentally deletes 3 months of work with Visual Studio Code

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Re: Developer accidentally deletes 3 months of work with Visual Studio Code

#11

Post by tym0 »

He says that it wasn't in a repo, so it's a bit weird that it would delete all his files, it looks more like he had an initialised repo and hadn't committed the files yet.

I don't even know how you could work 3 months without committing, even working on a throwaway thing for more than a few hours I make a new local repo, it doesn't cost much.

Also the files are not gone, they are still on the hard-drive/SSD it's not that hard to look up file recovery software.

Re: Developer accidentally deletes 3 months of work with Visual Studio Code

#12

Post by arnioxux »

I predict one day we will look back and be horrified that there was ever a time where you can't just roll back an entire system to an arbitrary timestamp to undo accidental changes.

In some sense this is already achievable if you just always work inside a Dropbox folder (which keeps a 30 day history of any synced changes). But resources aren't yet cheap enough for all changes to be immutable.

Re: Developer accidentally deletes 3 months of work with Visual Studio Code

#14

Post by mjw1007 »

tym0 wrote: post #11

He says that it wasn't in a repo, so it's a bit weird that it would delete all his files, it looks more like he had an initialised repo and hadn't committed the files yet. I don't even know how you could work 3 months without committing, even working on a throwaway thing for more than a few hours I make a new local repo, it doesn't cost much. Also the files are not gone, they are still on the hard-drive/SSD it's not…

This post shows the likely sequence of actions that makes it happen: https://stackoverflow.com/a/33235641

It seems to have happened to rather a lot of people https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/expression/en-US/b3...

Re: Developer accidentally deletes 3 months of work with Visual Studio Code

#16

Post by WeedRamen »

Really feel for the guy. Hasn't happened to me, but I would hope a developer friendly editor would give warnings about when something like this could happen. Does VS Code have a tutorial? Haven't used it before, can't say I am inclined to right now...

Re: Developer accidentally deletes 3 months of work with Visual Studio Code

#18

Post by sashagim »

theknarf wrote: post #10

The sad part is that he didn't learn his lesson. The problem obviously isn't with Visual Studio Code, but with Git (or whatever version control software he tried out). It seems that he didn't know anything about using git and accidentally checked out a bare repo instead of adding his files to stage. From his post, he says he's using windows and he's used to things going into the recycle bin, something a Linux tool li…

You're blaming the victim. Yes, it's better to know git than not knowing it, but the developer was merely tossing around with the various options of the IDE. It shouldn't be that easy to make an operation with such disastrous results. It is the responsibility of the product designers to prevent this.

Re: Developer accidentally deletes 3 months of work with Visual Studio Code

#20

Post by lopespm »

tym0 wrote: post #11

He says that it wasn't in a repo, so it's a bit weird that it would delete all his files, it looks more like he had an initialised repo and hadn't committed the files yet. I don't even know how you could work 3 months without committing, even working on a throwaway thing for more than a few hours I make a new local repo, it doesn't cost much. Also the files are not gone, they are still on the hard-drive/SSD it's not…

Exactly, a good portion of deleted files could probably be salavaged using "Recuva" right away, for example
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