> I found myself on the phone to Rackspace, leaning on a desk for support, listening to their engineer patiently explain that backups for this MySQL instance had been cancelled over 2 months ago. Ah.
This is the issue not what the author did. It would be a matter of time that the database would have been accidentally deleted somehow.
Forget accidental deletion - this same exact incident would've occurred as soon as the database's hard drive failed, or some similar infrastructure disaster occurred.
Lack of backups is inexcusable, and ten times more egregious than the author's mistake.
This is the issue not what the author did. It would be a matter of time that the database would have been accidentally deleted somehow.