"We now have to explain to our clients, Fortune 500 companies why we can’t restore their account."
well, at least it appears that it STILL HELPS to GO PUBLIC when normal channels fail to get the needed attention...
and that the ultimate problem is bureaucracy and bureaucratic attitudes.
but yeah, having a local backup can be your ONLY salvation. a little over a week ago, a different contractor was supposed to commit his changes to github so that I could integrate it. If it wasn't bad enough that this guy took 2 weeks to do 2-3 days' worth of stuff [my opinion, or how long would it take ME to have done it], and we'd been after him the entire time to at least commit SOMETHING to the repo, he managed [with some GUI tool on a Mac] to WIPE OUT all of my significant changes and additions over the last 2 days when he uploaded his stuff to github (in effect, syncing up his private repo with the one on github, literally). ONLY because I'd had the foresight to have done a 'git pull' on my home machine before leaving, and having the ability to ssh in and grab a tarball of what the repo was 2 hours earlier, was I able to quickly fix this. a simple 'revert' probably would've left things in a worse state than a) tarball a snapshot, b) re-do the 'git clone' c) untar everything I did, d) git commit+push, and THEN have the other guy (one at a time) check in the files he worked on. I think that my method was faster, at any rate.
So yeah it helps to have some LOCAL backups, on multiple machines, just for things *like* this.
Oh yeah that particular contractor was given the "thank you very much for your hard work and effort" letter. I won't go into the other drama that preceded it, involving slack and a literal 'commit war' over a 3 day weekend when way too many things needed to be ready on Tuesday AM for review, 99% of it my effort for "last minute, because, THAT guy" integration purposes.
(ok vent complete)