I was gonna comment this, decided not to, then decided the info should be part of this thread either for OP or future readers, so here goes:

Enterprise Linux distributions are unbeatable for their purpose. To your point, I’ve never in my entire career had even the smallest issue maintaining one, they’re wonderful. They achieve this, though, by being a stable, truly versioned release that will never see anything beyond minor upgrades. The reason why nobody recommends server distros for gaming is because of hardware compatibility and library support, and you end up maintaining more of your own junk anyway. Got the latest gpu? Great, compile your drivers.

Enterprise Linux distros are awesome and the most painless Linux experience imaginable, as well as a great workstation experience too BUT they typically are among the worst options for gaming if you want a simple system.

I’m aware. The post was simply to get a recovery guide out there for a crappy situation.

100% my stack going forward. Thanks!

That’s the move.

Disturbingly effective is definitely the right phrase. It’s actually inspired me to create a script on my desktop that moves folders to ~/Trash, then I have another script that /dev/random’s the files and then /dev/zeros them before deletion. It eliminated risk of an accidental rm, AND make sure that once something is gone, it is GONE.

The server we were working at the time wasn’t configured with frequent backups, just a full backup once a month as a stop gap until the project got some proper funding. Any sort of remote version control is totally the preventative factor here, but my goal is to help others that have yet to learn that lesson.

I’m not denying that stupid stuff didn’t happen nor that this wasn’t entirely preventable. There’s some practical reasons that are unique to large, slow moving orgs that explain why it wasn’t (yet) in version control.