Not me personally, but one of my career mentor’s friend’s took down the entirety of Google Ads as an intern for like 10 minutes. Apparently it was a multi-million dollar mistake, but they fixed the issue so it couldn’t happen again and all was well afterward.
In my first couple months, I broke Amazon so that no-one in Europe could buy video for a few hours. On a Friday, right before going on a week’s vacation.
The way that the ensuing investigation and response was carried out - 100% blame-free, and focused on “how did these tools let him down? How can we make sure no-one ever makes that same mistake again?” - gave me a career-long interest in Software Resiliency and Incident Management.
You’re not a real SRE until you’ve caused at least a $100K outage. You’re not a good SRE until you’ve fixed it so nobody can ever make that particular one again.
If an intern (or damn near any employee) can be in a position to single handedly take down that scale of system it’s not the intern that should be fired - it’s the architect that baked that kind of weakness in the first place.
Just a folder full of duplicate files? Try to open them.
Having a drive image you can restore from? Take an extra drive and try to “restore” the contents of your backup onto it. You use the extra drive because if you just use your primary drive you may brick yourself.
There’s definitely types of backups I’m not covering here but you should do research into the type of backups you want to use and the restoration process, and basically try the restoration process intermittently.
I wanted a newer car, so I rolled my existing auto loan into the newer vehicles loan. So easy right?
I was upside down on it for years and years. It’s so disheartening to drive a vehicle that’s falling apart and stranding you everywhere but still owe $10k on it. It was an awful decision that took years of pain but that was my lesson on buying things I can afford.
Never let the car run out of gas. I was on the highway and the destination gas station was in sight. Well, even after putting more gas in from a Jerry can it wouldn’t start because debris clogged the fuel filter. Getting it towed + repaired was like $1000 when I could have just stopped at a gas station earlier.