Wowwww! Great to hear you had backups and could mostly restore your loss though!

You said you were working from the interactive shell so you didn't have history? Now I always use IPython, which does keep a history (which I set to very long), isn't there some way you can config the default Python interactive shell to keep a history as well? Sounds like that would be useful for all sorts of unexpected things. Otherwise, get IPython, it's really good, but still a plain interactive shell only with extra fancy features.

Glad to hear it turned out mostly all right though. I always feel for these data-loss stories because I can imagine what it'd be like ... that sinking feeling. Brrrr.