If anyone did that to you, then that’s based on you, not on the general indie community.
Either someone got access to the computer physically, or they got access to the computer through remote access (if you have bad firewall and passwords.)
Or, more likely, you did something wrong, but you didn’t realize what it was at the time, and now “hackers” seems the most logical explanation.
It probably feels pretty ****** for you – kind of like someone whose home gets vandalized. Someone broke in, smashed the flower pots, and emptied the aquarium on the floor – that feels ****** too. That means there’s bad people in the world, but probably doesn’t mean that there’s someone out to vandalize every house that’s green, or whatever.
More likely, it’s someone who for some reason wants to screw with me or doesn’t like me.
What should you do? You should set up an offsite source control solution.
Either use a free, public, system like github, or pay the $6/month for some virtual private server with a shell that you can git push to using SSH. interserver.net has a good option; digital ocean, dreamhost, rackspace.net, LiNode, or aws.amazon are other options, slightly more expensive.
Every day, you should “git add -a” and “git commit -m awesomestuff” and “git push”
That way, if something happens to your computer, you have all the files you need in at least one other location.
You should do this for your Documents folder, and your editor settings, and anything else you care about – there are so many ways to lose data!
- your house could burn down, taking the computer with it
- you could get too drunk and accidentally the everything
- the hard disk could fail
- russian mobsters could install ransomware that encrypts your hard disk and requires a thousand dollars ransom
- you could realize that you took a wrong turn, and the version you had two days ago was much better
A solid version control practice will save you from all of those problems, and more!