Last night I managed to delete the plugin I’ve been working on for the last three months. It’s all gone, there’s no backups, and using grep I only managed to salvage about four or five pretty useless functions from my hard drive.

I use xampp for Linux to turn my computer into a webserver. I was trying to reinstall the server cos it kept throwing an error, and to do that I had to delete the original files.

It was a grand moment of towering incompetence.

Quite happily I entered rm -Rv /opt/lampp and then watched as the console cheerfully filled up with messages telling me that each file was being deleted. I reinstalled the server, got it up and running (the error message was still there, of course) and remembered that all my plugin’s files were in /opt/lampp/htdocs. Well of course they were!

I then spent several hours trying to claw back what I could, but it’s all gone. I actually can’t believe it, such a stupid, stupid error. Consequently, this week is Use Windows Week. This is a special new Incompetence Awareness week that I’m instituting, where instead of using Linux to destroy my computer I shall be using Windows. At least that way there’s a nice sound scheme.

I’ve also just bought an Apple Mac. It just seemed like a logical conclusion: delete three month’s work, go mad for five hours until 4 in the morning, buy an Apple.

I think when it arrives I will just place it lovingly on my pillow, crawl under my bed and then shrivel up and die*.

The moral of the story is: make backups. Seriously, never before have I been so convinced of the power of backups.

* The eagle-eyed among you will be quick to point out that the order of events is more likely to be death and then shrivelling up, but it’s a metaphor for feeling crap.