It’s the waning days of the dot-com era, and this pilot fish is working at a startup whose codebase is maintained on a Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (VSS) server. Until the day it goes missing.

A programmer had decided to completely refresh his desktop computer development workspace by deleting the workspace files and then doing a resync with the VSS server version of the codebase. But for some reason all VSS users have root access on the server, and the programmer somehow manages to purge the entire codebase. Oh, did we mention that no backup was being done on that VSS server?

From the things-could-be-worse files, we can tell you that other programmers had a copy of the codebase on their desktop computers in various states of revision, allowing them to rebuild the codebase on the server — which from then on had limited root access.

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