When I just started as a junior dev at a small company I made the classic mistake of emptying the prod db instead of my local dev db. This was a small and in hindsight insignificant project. But Google was our customer, so it didn't feel insignificant at the time.
In this case my inexperience was partly my savior. All the data was inputted by people via a web form. Normally you're supposed to use POST to submit a form. But I was quite clueless at the time, so I had used GET. This meant all requests were still in the Apache logs. I could simply replay all requests.
I still feel my hard pounding when I think about the moment I realized what had happened. I was really relieved when everything was back!
What I learned from this incident:
- make automated backups
- no access to prod db from anywhere but prod