It’s amazing how important those three little words can be….
On wednesday I was about to start on some major changes to the app I’m working on so I thought I had better make sure all my source was checked into our source control system. Seems like a good idea don’t you think?
Well, we have recently rebuilt our development machine and its IP address had changed so I checked the latest source from the new machine and manually merged my source into that directory, again I believe a reasonable thing to do.
Feeling good about myself and wanting to keep my working directory tidy I deleted the source directory that I had my code in, safe in the knowledge that it was all in our source repository…. [b]or was it[/b]??
In my enthusiasm I had forgotten that I had added two new files to my source directory and had not copied them into source control, these two files represented nearly three days work by the way.
“Why don’t you just get them out of the Recycle Bin?” I hear you say….
Why?
Because I used the “Shift Delete” method to remove the folder and this by-passes the Recycle Bin.
“Why don’t you use an Undelete utility to get them back?”
Because my friends, I discovered my mistake at the end of the day and the deletion was done at the beginning, and unfortunately it would appear that the two crucial files were overwritten at some point during the intervening time….
The only option was to write the code again, which I did, luckily it only set me back half a day, but it is a painful leason I have learned……
I’ll leave you with this thought.
When it says “Are you sure?” make sure you are before you hit OK.
