3 days work gone, the story about recovering files

So, finally it happened. During my whole career I have always been able to blame someone else when a complete application and/or project has been deleted. In most cases it has been the design task in the domino environment that should be ashamed, or atleast the administrator that has the design task running on a dev server. Because it can’t be the developers responsibility to check the template inheritance on the database he’s working with. Can it?

Well, I’m into a great [tag]Websphere[/tag] project right now and we use the (in?)famous [tag]CVS[/tag] to store our code. Unfortunately I must use the companies VPN to access the CVS which makes my updates more infrequent. Yesterday evening I tried to add a new application to the CVS but realized that no VPN connection was established so I simply canceled and thought I should do it a bit later. This was a project that has around 40 hours of work behind it.

Then I got the dreaded ServletContext lookup for /XXX returned the portal context. It has to be a different one. And no restart-project helped. So I started to delete some EAR files with the goal to create a new EAR. I did this in a very aggregated mode and started to click around a bit frustrated when I realized that I actually had deleted the complete PROJECT. The very same that I didn’t checked in five minutes earlier.

This is of course very shame full, I’m simply too senior to do mistakes like this. But worser is that I’m way too senior to not back up my stuff.

Anyway, Google Talk is a bless and I found a friend on-line that helped me find a recovery tool via this good reading we found r-tools technology. So far it has helped me brining back all the files except some resources and one bean. I’m still searching for that bean.

I can recommend the tools above when it comes to recover files, they are not fast, but do their job. And in the mean time, don’t wait with that backup/file-copy/check-in.

If it crossed your mind: Just do it.
PS. If someone has a good tip on how to solve the ServletContext lookup for /XXX returned the portal context. It has to be a different one. please share!