Oooops I pressed the wrong button

This is intrinsically nonsensical, it cannot happen this way, a computer programmer is not physically there when the program he wrote is being used by an end user, the accusation is total bullshit which is being used to cover someone's backside.

If a programmer presses a delete key he deletes a single letter of code which the compiler will then refuse to turn into a binary program, compilers don't give a f*** you get one bit of code out of place and your don't have a computer program, simples

You can only lose your data when the PROGRAM you are running DOES something, the programmer is not PHYSICALLY there when YOU are RUNNING the program.

Some idiot of an 'End User' pressed the DELETE key, the police are simply covering up some moronic action by a member of staff, what is worse it sounds like they were running an end user database i.e. something you would keep on your own computer, not something that has a hardware infrastructure consisting of continuous replication of working data and regular data migration to some kind of cold storage backup medium.

That is the real problem some d**k probably had a Microsoft Access Database on his desktop computer that someone in the department had cobbled together and then no one had a backup strategy for the local PC's or laptop's, so when this dumpling's computer crashed horribly they lost the lot.

Seriously, while this is purely speculation on my part it is based on a good professional guess.

By the way, if you don't know, a 'Compiler' is a special computer program that turns 'Code' (the stuff I write) into binary code that the computer can actually run on its processor (the stuff you use).

Timmers, everyone makes mistakes, you only gain that experience from the mistakes and the 'close to mistakes moments'.

One of my biggest mistakes?

I ran a script in 1993 (that I had written) that dropped the live financial database for management of the Scottish budget!

They had just spent six weeks entering the baseline data, data entry clerks working day after day, and Noddy here dropped it, that means I pressed the 'DELETE' key

This was on good Friday of that year, I was looking forward to getting home for the holiday weekend and this incident happened around lunchtime, everyone in that government office was going home early that day, I was a contractor, I was not going home early, I HAD to fix the problem.

Backups, yes everyone has them and they did too, Arcserve on a Netware server, first port of call, restore the Oracle database from the backup, should be very simple and luckily it was holiday time and no one was working so the database was static.

Arcserve on Netware, utter **** would it restore from the backup, no chance, I could see the data was there on the tape but I could not overwrite the existing database for some reason and I did not have enough space to make an additional copy so I could try a complete restore.

In the end I had to trust in 'God' (faith) the only way to restore from tape was to make enough space on the disk and that meant I had to delete the only good certain copy I had of the system.

Needless to say in the end it worked, Arcserve finally restored from the backup but only after I physically deleted the only copy I had of the system, if not I would not be here in this industry today, that was the single worst moment in my career.

I got out of there about 9pm that night when you write computer programs you take ultimate responsibility for what those programs actually do in the real world, if you create a bug then you have to fix it when it turns up in the real world, what you don't have to fix are idiots pressing delete keys!

Any big organisation must surely have a back up system otherwise anyone working for them can do all sorts of damage.

I work for a well known supermarket, and all our computer systems are backed up constantly at head office 24/7 and all activity carried out at branch level is logged, every single keyboard stroke on any till or back office computer. I was at head office a couple of years ago, and sat in with the tech support and they showed me everything that was going on in our store, right down to live monitoring of the tills, and even what the store manager was looking at on his screen.

Yeah they should Rob, so either the Police are lying about what happened or they were running on really primitive systems based on an 'office' scale database.

Custom commercial computer systems used in high end supermarkets are a world way from what you get in any government system, competition breeds good software in commercial environments, it is their lifeblood these days.

If I put all of my PST's back online I would have a similar amount of history, I currently have all my email going back to 2004 in my Office 365 account.

Compuserve are still around, I have backups of my old Compuserve account still on disk somewhere, but again an offline disk

Compuserve was a great system back in the 1990's, I think I first joined Compuserve back in the late 80's, it was certainly via their TCPIP gateway that I first accessed the internet with a Telnet client.

Were you military halo?

The Samuels reference is my reason for asking, my dad was proficient back in ww2.

Never used IP over radio myself.