Man accidentally deleted his entire company

In today's age one command can put everything at stake. In one such move, Marco Marsala, an entrepreneur ran a command that accidentally deleted his entire company. This came to light when Marco Marsala detailed his predicament on a forum called Server Fault. As The Independent reports, the forum aims to help server administrators resolve problems and software issues. However, as expected, his case was largely beyond help.

Marsala's command removed every file stored on the servers, which also included, previously held customer websites his company was responsible for hosting.  He was running maintenance operations using Linux command "rm -rf" on his servers. The Linux command "rm" means delete while the option "-rf"  force removes everything, even if it is open or being used. This command also hides the messages that usually warn you -- "this probably isn't what you wanted to do".

Furthermore, the command is meant to run with a specified directory, but, Marsala ran it by accident and hence no directory was given. This in turn triggered a kind of Linux file that contains executable code often termed as from a Bash script.

What added to the woes was that Marsala even deleted his backups. Yes, you read it right, he did have offsite backups and he did manage to delete them swell.  He had just connected to the provider and mounted the drives to his computer for access and this gave the Linux command access to the offsite backup server too, allowing it to wipe that content alongside everything else.

On the Server Fault forum, Marsala has been getting varied responses like one user, named Swen, said "I feel sorry to say that your company is now essentially dead."; His company earlier hosted the websites of some 1,500 customers. It provided servers for the website owners.

Therefore, Marsala's command also deleted the websites the company was responsible for and now customers will be dependent on their own backups to restore the damage and get their site registered with another provider.

One of the users named Michael Hampton said,"You're going out of business," said  another user. "You don't need technical advice, you need to call your lawyer." The forum directed Marsala to  seek professional help from data recovery experts as soon as possible.

Let's see, he might be able t recover some data using specialist techniques as long as the affected hard drives haven't had time to overwrite the old contents.