In our professional lives, stuff happens like this man who a few months ago accidentally destroyed production database on the first day of his job or this engineer from Amazon whose minor typo brought the entire Internet Network of Amazon down.

In a similar incident, a software developer recently claimed that he accidentally and permanently deleted three months of his work because of Visual Studio Code.

Visual Studio Code is a source code editor developed by Microsoft for Windows, Linux, and macOS. It includes support for debugging, embedded Git control, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, snippets, and code refactoring

In a now deleted post (cache available here), the developer Eliecer Thoms from Panama wrote that: “I had just downloaded Visual Studio Code as an alternative, and I was just playing with the source control option, seeing how it wanted to stage five thousand files I clicked discard… And it deleted all my files, all of them, permanently!

[…]

How the f*** is this s*** possible, who the hell is the dumbf**k who made the option to permanently delete all the files on a project by accident even possible?? Cannot even find them in the recycle bin!!!! I didn’t even think that was possible on the windows!!! F*** this f*** editor and f*** whoever implemented this option. I wish you the worst.”

Then there were 14 lines cussing the Visual Studio Code developers.

However, in reply, one developer asked: “Why you have three months of work not under source control is the bigger question.” In reply, the Thoms said: “Yeah, so the damage done by the destructive bug in the code is now my fault for not being a clairvoyant and seeing this piece of shit software was going to fuck up my files.

[…]

I don’t need to explain why I don’t have a private repo with my stuff. It is the software’s concern NOT to destroy the integrity of a computer like a damn virus. You come here, see my despair and berate me for something that was not my fault, and has happened to a lot of other people? F*** you.”

The post was originally identified by Joshtops on Slashdot. However, it is unclear if the developer was able to get his data back or not. That’s why offsite backups and revision control is a very good idea.

If you play with such a massive trove of data always backup your files and make sure – never keep a single copy of your files in one system.