Many of the replies were pretty negative, and some even doubted the user was real based on the unprofessional errors he made (did we mention he owned a hosting business?). One even said, "you're going out of business. You don't need technical advice, you need to call your lawyer." However, less fatalistic folks suggested taking the disks to a recovery firm to see if the data could be saved.

Luckily, there appears to be a happy ending: "We consulted a data recovery company who analyzed one of our 1,500+ server disks for a reasonable feel, and after diagnoses, sent ... a list of recoverable files. All files are here. Now we're finding the money to pay [them] for all our servers." Meanwhile, let's all heed the advise of "Tim" from the same forum: "Backups need to be offsite, offline and incremental. That you could delete them from your main server means they weren't what I would call backups."

Update: It was too good a story to be true, apparently -- the coder says it was all a joke. Sorry, folks.