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Comment by cesaref | Hacker News Reader

Back in the 90s I remember a work colleague asking 'can you rollback a drop table?', to which I replied 'no', and all the blood drained from his face in seconds. It's one of those things you've heard happens to people, but until you see it, you can't quite believe it.

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> can you rollback a drop table

>_< , something similar happened to me when I did an rm -Rf * in the old pictures directory on my system ... Well ... It wasn't the old pictures directory, it was the backup directory with all pictures from my older phone !! To say that blood drained from my face would be an understatement, thankfully I was able to recover most of it.

The first thing I did after the recovery marathon was to alias rm so that it instead works by moving stuff to /tmp

In the late 90’s I wanted to try this Linux thing, so I followed a tutorial. First step:

    fdisk

Yes, that was my Windows partition going bye-bye.

So... success? ;)

:D task failed successfully !

I mean, he arguably did F the Disk, sounds correct

inb4: /tmp partition gets full. Causing things to brake. :-)

No problem, just use rm ;)

My boss was doing housecleaning in his PDP-11 (Unix v.6) account and did a "rm *" in the bin directory but OOPS it was the system bin.

Since this seems to be such a common occurrence, why haven't databases evolved to maintain some limited form of history that can be rolled back? Have no idea of the complexity, so forgive me if that sounds daft.

Long story short, you’re holding multiple transactions open. That’s a lot of bookkeeping overhead if there’s a lot of changes. A system with a few million rows and moderate load on a reasonably-sized server for that load will slam to a halt.

Then come the “site is down and the world is ending” tickets, messages, emails, and phone calls.

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