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Comment by 3eb7988a1663 | Hacker News Reader

While I am sure a huge portion of valuable work will be lost, I am smirking thinking of management making a call, "So, if there is any shadow IT who has been running mirror databases of valuable infrastructure, we would have a no questions asked policy on sharing that right now".

I know that I have had to keep informal copies of valuable systems because the real source of truth is continually patched,offline,churn,whatever.

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Reminds me when Toy Story 2 was deleted and they found the backups on an artist's laptop that was working from home.

It was on their SGI workstation that they lugged to home, but yeah, pretty much that's how they recovered most of the files. At the end they barely used the material.

>artist

technically, it was the supervising technical director.

The only reason this happened (I don't think "working from home" was very common in 1999) was because she just had a baby! I love this story because it feels like good karma – management providing special accommodations for a new mom saves the show.

If SK is anything similar to Germany or Japan in how they are digitizing their government processes, you'll probably be able to find paper printouts of all the data that was lost.

The fun part will be finding them, figuring out their relevance, and re-digitizing them in a useful form.

The extra fun will be if they can find multiple copies of unknown provenance. Who wins?

On the other hand, I hope a few boots on the ground get to use this as a chance to toss decades of bad technical debt. "Why are we still running that 2011 Oracle database version?".

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