[zackola]

I like asking people when the last time they've done irreparable harm to data was. (deleting a database table, formatting something they shouldn't have, etc...) Those who say never are liars. Those who have agony in their faces as they answer but can't tell me what they've done to prevent the situation from occurring in the future or those who don't care are pretty unprofessional. Those who regale us with heroic stories of accepting the blame for their mistakes, fixing it in the best way possible and putting safeguards in place to minimize the possibility of it occurring again are pros in my book.

[stcredzero]

I've accidentally truncated a database table in a dev environment, bringing all sorts of testing and development to a halt and making my manger's life miserable for a few days. (Due to some really bad menu design in an admin tool. Instead of a right-click for "Renaming" a column, there should have been an indication that a table truncate would be happening in there somewhere.)

I would never have agony in my face about it, perhaps because the event wasn't "irreparable." The database was just reloaded from production. My first answer to your question would be "never" because the event really wasn't consequential. In fact, I'd question just how "professionally" run an organization is if a data deletion event is of dire consequence. Anything important should be backed up and easily restorable.

Some decades back, someone did a study of companies that had some disaster happen. (Fire, flood, etc...) Of the ones that lost their data, only something like 3% of them survived the next year. Digital data is the most easily backed up corporate asset and probably the most important.

(To keep it from happening again, I'd use a different tool entirely, if given a choice. In that case, I wasn't!)

[zackola]

A very professional answer! You'd be surprised at the number of organizations and individuals that don't have some sort of backup solution in place, so the question will also filter out those. Even if you have backups or the data isn't 'irreparably' lost I'd imagine you agonized a bit from causing your coworkers a few days of pain, or if you need to restore from backups, perhaps a few hours of downtime? I guess I should change my question from using the word irreparably.

[Dylanlacey]

I think "Accepting blame for their mistakes and tries to learn from them" is the connsumate core of professionality. I've also further noticed that it really is a poor craftsman who always blames their tools.