Ask HN: What did you lose forever because you had no backup?
postit Tuesday, December 23, 2025A friend and I were talking about a DOS POS system we wrote decades ago. It was crude, handwritten using Turbo Pascal DBF files and somehow still running in a few places since it got pirated.
We no longer have the source. No install disks. No backups. The software survived longer than our memory of it.
It made me realize how often "temporary" work outlives its creators, while the source vanishes.
What’s the most important thing you lost because you assumed you’d back it up later? Code, data, research, art, configs, anything.
Did that loss permanently change how you handle backups?
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