My dad once rm -rf’ed his company’s payroll server by accident. He was a database admin at the time. He was asked to make a quick update to something. Instead of running it as a transaction (which would have been reversible) he went “eh it’s a simple update.” He hit Enter after typing out the change for the one entry, and saw “26478 entries updated”. At that point, his stomach fell out of his asshole.

The company was too cheap to commit to regular 3-2-1 backups, so the most recent backup he had was a manual quarterly backup from three months ago. Luckily, Payroll still had paper timesheets for the past month, so they were able to stick an intern on data entry and get people paid. So they just had a void for those two months in between the backup and the paper timesheets.

It wasn’t a huge issue, except for the fact that one of their employees was on parole. The parole officer asked the company to prove that the employee was working when he said he was. The officer wanted records for, you guessed it, the past three months. At that point, the company had to publicly admit to the fuckup. My dad was asked to resign… But at least the company started funding regular 3-2-1 backups (right before his two week notice was up.)