Backup script ingested an accidental asterisk and deleted everything
Jump to main content
Search
REG AD
Storage
Backup script ingested an accidental asterisk and deleted everything
Letting a 21-year-old write critical code without supervision is not smart
Simon Sharwood
Simon<br>Sharwood
APAC Editor
Published<br>mon 18 May 2026 // 07:30 UTC
WHO, ME? Welcome to Monday morning, the time of week when The Register always asks “Who, Me?” because that’s the title of our reader-contributed column in which you confess to having made a mess, and found a way to egress without career distress.<br>This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Miller” who told us that as a whippersnapper of just 21 summers he found himself tending a mainframe that created a virtual machine, and accompanying virtual disk, for each user.<br>Miller’s employer shut down those VMs at the end of the working<br>day to free up resources for overnight jobs. He therefore wrote a cleanup routine<br>that removed the drives and backed up their contents.
REG AD
This story took place in 1981, a time when it was possible for<br>code written by a 21-year-old to go into production without much scrutiny.
REG AD
Oversight arrived at 3 AM, when the overnight operators ran<br>Miller’s cleanup code and it produced a “file not found” message.
MORE CONTEXT
Hope your holiday was horrid: You botched the last thing you did before leaving
'Invisible mouse' made a mess of PC rebuild
IT manager approved downtime over lunch, but made a meal of it
Lab worker built a fake PC to nuke his lunch
Miller spent his entire Saturday finding the problem, the<br>roots of which lay in the fact that the mainframe assigned a letter to each<br>user drive, with A-Z as the available labels.<br>“The routine attached to all users’ drives and backed them<br>up to a temporary drive,” Miller explained. “But you never knew in advance what<br>drive letter the system would assign to the temporary drive. So I wrote a<br>routine to attach it and capture the letter.”<br>That approach worked, until it didn’t – because on this day<br>Miller’s employer gave another user an account on the mainframe. And that user’s<br>virtual drive meant the mainframe used the entire alphabet of disks.<br>“The call for temp disk failed and my routine passed back an<br>asterisk instead of an error code,” Miller confessed.<br>The routine then ran its delete command, but instead of specifying<br>a drive letter to destroy, applied the asterisk and deleted everything.<br>“Every file, all the data, and all the code,” Miller admitted.<br>“I had written all the code myself, long before the days of<br>peer reviews or DevOps or any other controls, so it was all on me,” he added.
REG AD
The Register thinks that’s a bit harsh –<br>who lets a kid write mission-critical code?<br>It took Miller a day to restore data, while 20 other people twiddled<br>their thumbs and waited for him to finish the job.<br>“Hard lesson but it's stayed with me 40+ years!” Miller concluded.<br>Have you written code that went awry? Or failed to supervise<br>a junior? In either case, click here to send us an email so we can tell your tale on a future Monday. ®
who me<br>storage<br>mainframe<br>data loss
REG AD
Security
Poland directs officials to ditch Signal in favor of 'secure' state-developed alternative
Shift comes amid mounting reports of successful social engineering attacks targeting higher-ups in government
OSes
Windows boot partition runs out of space for Microsoft's May security update
Testing? We've heard of it
ZTE showcases at GSMA M360 LATAM 2026, driving future business model restructuring - AI & network two-way integration
AI-integrated networks can cut costs, boost 5G efficiency, and help regional telcos shift beyond basic connectivity
Security
F-35 software delays leave UK buying time with US glide bombs
MoD says StormBreaker will plug gap until homegrown SPEAR 3 integration lands
Columnists
Utah tells porn sites to take the P out of VPNs, and it's their fault that they can't
Governments can't touch VPNs technically or commercially. The mess they'll make if they try will be off the scale
Security
Mozilla warns UK: Breaking VPNs will not magically fix Britain's age-check mess
Firefox maker says the tools are basic security infrastructure, not teenage contraband
MOST POPULAR
AI + ML
Google users fight for refunds as unauthorized API usage bills soar
Systems
Europe built sovereign clouds to escape US control. Then forgot about the processors
Security
Anthropic’s bug-hunting Mythos was greatest marketing stunt ever, says cURL creator
Security
Linus Torvalds says AI-powered bug hunters have made Linux security mailing list ‘almost entirely unmanageable’
Networks
Veteran network architect proposes IPv8 – to improve IPv4, not leapfrog v6
EVENTS
The Hardware Crunch: How Supply Chain Turbulence Is Forcing a New IT Playbook
Infrastructure teams are facing a perfect storm: extended hardware lead times, rising costs driven by AI demand, and accelerated platform timelines.
From Prompt to...