Ask HN: What did you lose forever because you had no backup?

#1

Post by postit » Tue, Dec 23, 2025, 10:23 PM UTC

A friend and I were talking about a DOS POS system we wrote decades ago. It was crude, handwritten using Turbo Pascal DBF files and somehow still running in a few places since it got pirated.

We no longer have the source. No install disks. No backups. The software survived longer than our memory of it.

It made me realize how often "temporary" work outlives its creators, while the source vanishes.

What’s the most important thing you lost because you assumed you’d back it up later? Code, data, research, art, configs, anything.

Did that loss permanently change how you handle backups?

Re: Ask HN: What did you lose forever because you had no backup?

#2

Post by icedchai » Tue, Dec 23, 2025, 10:43 PM UTC

I ran a BBS as a teenager and wish I kept a backup of it. I wrote it myself. The source code I could live without. But it would've been fun to see some of those crazy posts from the early 90's.

Re: Ask HN: What did you lose forever because you had no backup?

#3

Post by nrhrjrjrjtntbt » Tue, Dec 23, 2025, 11:19 PM UTC

University project (a game) I wrote in Java (Java applet!). Not a big deal and not a great game but would love to see my bad old cold. (Or great code?)

Re: Ask HN: What did you lose forever because you had no backup?

#4

Post by 4d4m » Tue, Dec 23, 2025, 11:33 PM UTC

A whole album

Re: Ask HN: What did you lose forever because you had no backup?

#5

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Dec 24, 2025, 2:47 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What did you lose forever because you had no backup?

#6

Post by accrual » Wed, Dec 24, 2025, 2:50 AM UTC

I lost a lot of my early computing history when I had everything on an external NTFS hard disk became corrupted. School projects, early Game Maker games I worked on, first music collection. The worst part is it was probably trivially recoverable with Photorec, but I had no idea that existed or how to use it at the time, so I just formatted the drive and went on with life. Wish I had left it alone!

Re: Ask HN: What did you lose forever because you had no backup?

#7

Post by pants2 » Wed, Dec 24, 2025, 2:51 AM UTC

In High School my friends and I made a movie that was the culmination of all our filmmaking talent and fun. It was about a guy who finds an old pair of leather pants that turns him into his ancestor, a viking, and that viking goes to school... Sounds dumb but it was truly hilarious in the late stage edits that I saw! The hard drive of that computer died during the final render and we weren't able to recover it. Tragic!

Re: Ask HN: What did you lose forever because you had no backup?

#8

Post by darklake » Wed, Dec 24, 2025, 2:52 AM UTC

Multiple 100 megapixel images from Nunavut and Nunavik, Canada. I have the prints, just not the source. Bummer

Re: Ask HN: What did you lose forever because you had no backup?

#9

Post by drweevil » Wed, Dec 24, 2025, 4:29 AM UTC

I lost some DSP code I was working on (DOS, ca. '95). I wanted to recompile it, so I did something like 'del *.obj'. Or meant to. I typed 'del * obj' instead. Lost a day’s worth of work. (DOS even asked me if I was sure. “Of course I’m sure”, I thought as I mashed the Enter key.)

Result? I learned how to use make. (Borland had a nice one). I also started using my first VCS tool, sourcesafe (pre-Microsoft).

Re: Ask HN: What did you lose forever because you had no backup?

#10

Post by naishoya » Wed, Dec 24, 2025, 5:46 AM UTC

I had a hardware raid array, which in the middle of resilvering (with an XFS filesystem), suffered a power loss. It turned out that the initial drive failure was symptomatic of the impending power supply failure, and after replacement of the PSU, was unable to resume resilvering due to a corruption of filesystem metadata...

I carried the drives around in hopes of recovering the codebase for a virtualized+distributed SSI OS (Kerrighed-module-based), which had been in the works for about a year at that point.

Due to changes between 2.4/2.6 and 3.x kernel; the rise of user-level distributed computing in C/RIU, kubernetes+docker, I never really recovered the work: there were partial backups of some of the features scattered across three contributors' systems, but no coherent backup of the unifying components; and well "life" with one of the key contributors becoming 'Justice Impacted' stalled any real progress.

I use this as a personal motivation for RAID!=Backup.