Restore from backup?

Question

The cynic in me wants to post a question & answer

I accidentally my hard drive. What do I do now?

I accidentally

• Wiped my boot drive
• Tried to resize my partition
• Tried to fix/adjust my Boot Camp partition from inside Windows
• got a blank screen after a failed OS update
• typed sudo rm -rf /
• chown'd my entire machine
• dropped my Mac/pad/phone & now it doesn't work
• lent my Mac/phone/pad to someone & they...
• disassembled my fusion drive
• Used beta software/APFS etc on a mission-critical machine
• Updated to High Sierra on an encrypted drive & the APFS conversion failed.
• Stored my only copy of valuable data on a flash drive
• etc etc etc

Then simply post the answer

Restore your machine from your last backup

mark it as correct & link as a dupe every other question to which it applies.

So... my actual question is...
Would this get me a hat?
^{Note: This entire question is not really meant to be taken seriously, but it's hat season, so why not.}

Late Edit
It really does appear as though this issue ought to be taken seriously - I'm adding real-world examples, as I find them. Let these become the...

Darwin Awards for dead data

Trouble with encrypted SD card
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/287721/how-to-recover-data-from-a-partition-overwritten-by-an-os-x-installer
SD card shows up as Internal in Disk Utility which was a follow-up to
MacBook wont boot after creating two small partitions
Big file folder icon at the center of the screen when tried macOS high Sierra public beta
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/296053/hfs-journaled-and-encrypted-flash-drive-does-not-accept-password
MacBook Pro lost SSD during macOS High Sierra update
MacBook Pro OS corrupted while upgrading to High Sierra 10.13
Accessing my contacts from broken iPhone?
Recover deleted encrypted boot drive, need all data back
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/302305/photos-and-notes-from-iphone-disappeared-unsolved
Any way to undisable (not Unlock) my phone without factory resetting / restoring it?
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/305052/backup-to-shattred-screen-iphone-that-i-cant-unlcok-need-help-real-quick
Unable to boot into macOS or Ubuntu after dd and partition reduction
Data Recovery Tool to recover lost Chrome User Data Dirs
Folders in executable drive converted into 0 byte “Unix Executable” files
After deleting kali linux partition, macOS partition startup Volume type FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF

Answer 1

Meta hat? Quite possibly. Would be diabolical to make you self Ask anD self answer on meta and on main for a pixel overlay.

I endorse the clear canonical question - especially if it helps get people a clear answer.

Answer 2

I disagree with creating a canonical question for this. With each one of those cases, whilst ‘restore from backup’ is a suitable answer, there are other answers which apply to specific cases. For example, adjusting Boot Camp partition from Windows has many answers beside restoring from a backup, but those answers wouldn't apply to the other cases. Canonical answers are great, but make sure they only canonicalise those questions which are identical.