Lost Code?

[CW]

I'm a little ticked today. I arrived at the library this morning to do some coding, only to discover that I did not bring the latest version of my Color Wheel program with me.  Annoying, right? Yeah, but not too bad. So I walked back home, transferred the latest file to my thumb-drive, and then drove to the library again. There I discovered that the night before I had, somehow, overwritten my latest version with an earlier version! Gah! An entire day's programing lost It was late. That's what I get for not knowing when to stop and call it a night. 

I am now back home, where I have recovered the version previous to that; but now I'm not much in the mood for programing. Maybe I should crawl back into bed with the cat. =^..^=
It's just one of those days.

I'm glad I make regular backups. The loss wasn't too bad, just one day. But it is frustrating. My question to you is, what is the worst code-loss you have ever experienced, and how did it happen? Any stories you'd like to share?

I once lost a week's worth of coding, years ago (when I never bothered with backups) after one bad revision attempt in the spaghetti-code I used to write wound up trashing the program and got me hopelessly lost in the weeds, in a way that was beyond fixing. The more I tried to undo the damage, the more I screwed it up. 
Ah well. Lesson learned. What about you?
-CW

[Marmor]

i backup 5 years coding source to a 40 gb hd and delete the  originalsource from server.
a little bit later the hd create a crash landing !
bumm 

[bigsofty]

Very sorry to hear that, it's always numbingly painful to loose work.

I use this:-

http://www.secondcopy.com/

It's easy to use and quite powerful. It runs regular scheduled incremental backups, keeping any changes I make to my code. it runs invisibly in the background, saving my projects to a USB key and a cloud folder. Nothing is foolproof but it helps me feel a little secure.

[erico]

I lost plenty of stuff already for many reasons, my own and external causes.
Altough I do miss some of my old work long gone for historical reasons, I somehow managed to re-do and improve.

...but it does pi** one off quite hard. A horrible sensation when it happens.

[CW]

Oh... OUCH Marmor. 5 YEARS of coding??  That sux.

Thx Softy. I'll check that out. It occurs to me that had I been using your utility I would only be out a couple of hours code, at most, and backing up to the cloud would have saved me a lot of running back and forth between the library and home. Good advice. I'll look into it.

Erico, that's a good philosophy. Try not to look at it as a loss, try to look at it as a chance to improve. lol  Thx.

-CW

[erico]

Kind of a´forced´chance to improve hehe

But I think the stress involved on such situation can do oneself a lot of harm.
When it happens, it is not something we can do much about, so I think it is good not to take huge stress on myself.
Easier said then done though, but it helps me thinking that way and getting back to improve as quick as I can.

...also, to do a lot of physical exercices can easy up too (the mind!).

I once lost a full Jazz drive disk with a couple of very unique 2 years work, things I loved and worked with the upmost care.
Objects and renders of a fantastic city and its structures I constructed piece by piece, etc etc many km in size and detail, vehicles and so on.

Kind of reminds of ´The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath´ by HP Lovecraft...

[Ian Price]

I "lost" over two years worth of code when I was coding with DIV Games Studio due to the death of an old pc (which when sent for repair returned with a clean HD). The worst thing about it was that I had backups on a website and Div Arena (including the full games), but both websites were killed off at the roughly the same time (I changed ISP, who deleted my site and Div Arena just died without any warning to Div users).

I did have backup CDs to pretty much everything, but much of it wasn't necessarily upto date. And I couldn't use it on my next computer (Windows XP) as Div was DOS based and didn't run on XP. So it's effectively lost.

[hardyx]

It's a bad thing when you lost your work. I use Dropbox to save my projects versions and compressed in zips. I have a local copy of the zips and a copy in the Net. I name the files in this way: project.datever.changes.zip

project: name of the project, without spaces
datever: date in the form ddmmyy and a letter (a, b, c, ...) for version in that day.
changes: tiny comment about the changes (a name).

P.S. I use Subversion in my main projects too, for saving all versions of code, using other partition for storing.

[Ian Price]

I make multiple back-ups on my USB drive, SD card and external HD and GMail nowadays.

[matchy]

  I had a 2TG Nas box which I now use just the drive as a second internal SATA. I feel so anxious to get another 1 or 2TB external because I need to backup my backup drive. Then sooner I'll need a third because the first has sector warnings.

[Slydog]

I use DropBox to store my project files.
The free DropBox account has 30 day versioning for all your files.
Any older file version you have from the past 30 days can be recovered.

It saved my butt on more than one occasion.
But, the free version only has 2Gb, so I have to keep swapping files in and out.

[Moru]

I'm using Cubby since a while. Unlimited versioning and 5 GB space. 1 GB extra for every friend joining up to 25 GB. It's just out of beta. If you pay you get also direct sync between all your computers/phones and 100 GB storage.

https://cub.by/i/01_Ldct-rBaDxY <-- my referer link :-)