Comment by skissane

A friend once told me a story about a software company that had offices in the World Trade Center in New York. Their offices were totally destroyed by 9/11; thankfully, all the staff got out alive, but it turned out they didn't have offsite backups of the source code repository, and it was lost completely. They found various bits of the source code floating around (e.g. some developers had bits of it on their home computers), but there were a few key components they could not locate any source for. Well, the customers still had the compiled binaries, so they got the binaries back from the customers, extracted the missing bits, ran them through a decompiler, and checked the result into the source code repository – since the application was written in Java, this actually worked quite well. Years later, new developers would find bits of obviously decompiled code still in the source repo (you can tell, it has a distinct look to it, e.g. variable names with numbers in them), and scratch their heads, and then get told the tale.