Had one of those surreal moments today, and not in a good way. My boss, who is a great guy (and I don’t say that just because he might be reading this) found me and informed me that he might have accidentally deleted a table in Microsoft Access in which I painstakingly spent weeks entering over 2500 records with 24 fields each. At first, I figured he was joking and then I slowly and agonizingly realized how mistaken I was.
How does one accidentally delete a table? He was doing something fancy in SQL so it wasn’t that he just pushed the “Delete” button or anything. It was just one of those things.
After languishing for a while, we finally heard from the Information Systems folks that they did have a back-up. . . from 4 days ago. I now have to sift through the data and figure out which 100+ records have been entered in the last four days and are thus missing from the information recovered from the back-up. Once I figure that out, I’ll re-enter them. I’m not thrilled about it but it’s much better than the alternative of starting all over. (This is my optimistic side trying desperately to see the good in the situation.)
So, I guess this just reminds me that be it user error or hardware failure, something like this will happen eventually. I’ve just backed-up my Microsoft Money records and am going to work on a system to regularly back-up our hard drives at home. The real trick will be to make sure that the back-ups are stored off-site somewhere safe as there’s no use in having a back-up if it burns down with the contents of your house. Randy would say this is my dark, fatalistic side coming out. I say it’s just my smart, cautious, conscientious side.