Consultant mistakenly deleted a ton of data – but reported it as a bug

Software

And he got away with it too!

WHO, ME? Is showing up for work every Monday a mistake? While you ponder that question, dive into a new installment of Who, Me? – The Register's weekly column that shares readers' stories of escaping their errors.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Evan," who wrote to us from the side of a pool while his kids had a swimming lesson!

"I work in test automation as a consultant and for one client I had to record test evidence as video," he explained, adding that the client's test management tool stored the vids.

The resulting files weren't individually large, but by the time Evan had recorded 600 of them, managing all those files was starting to get a bit cumbersome.

"Removing them manually was far too slow and wasn't feasible," he wrote. So he wrote a script to clean things up all at once.

"Obviously this data was important, and I'm not reckless," Evan wrote. He therefore carefully debugged the script using breakpoints. "I stepped through every line, I checked all values, and I could see everything was right. Then I let the code try to delete the one file I was watching."

The script deleted that file. And everything else in the container that the test tool used to store videos and plenty of other data.

Did we mention this happened in the middle of a project, meaning Evan's action was profoundly unwelcome?

Evan reckoned he was probably at fault, but decided not to confess to his client and instead informed them about the data loss and logged a support ticket.

The client therefore assumed this incident was an accident and was cool about it.

After a week of back-and-forth with support, Evan got good news. His client's support team was able to restore the data from a backup and could not find a reason for the incident.

And then came even better news. "They took all ownership of the fault," Evan admitted. "They were very apologetic and said one of their SaaS scripts had gone haywire and deleted the content."

Evan therefore escaped blame and carried on consulting – and is clearly doing well enough to pay for multiple kids to have swimming lessons!

Have you successfully escaped blame for an error? If so, click here to send an email to Who, Me? It would be a mistake not to share your story so we can present it to your fellow readers. ®