Can I sue web developer who messed up my website?

Dear Blackahatters,

Can I sue or get compensation for a web developer who deleted modifications work in my website and cannot get them back? Also for just taking too much time...
He tells me yh I will fix it in 3 days, then after 1 week still nothing done, I orginally hired to fix an error I had with my cart, but now he has changed the whole website and there are so many errors in the website now and some of the modifications which I paid $200 is deleted, he told me he is going to write it for free for me but it's just been taking so long and I'm done with him, I told him to just revert my website to how it was but I'm skeptic that he hasn't done a backup, so worst case scenario he hasnt done a back-up are there any actions I could take?

I live in the UK if that makes a difference

Thanks guys for reading this.

I doubt it very much, unless you have a waterproof contract and a decent lawyer.

You could try....

It's really your own fault for not having a backup for your site. I'm going to make the assumption that you picked the cheapest vendor - if that's true (hopefully it's not), you get what you pay for. There are some good deals, but you have to be careful and do your research on what the person knows.

In most cases you can get a backup from your webhost. If you're using CPanel, there's a good chance that you already have backups running - you just need to be quick about retrieving it. If it's only been a day or so, check your backups folder with FTP, otherwise try contacting your webhost to see if they can give you a backup from earlier.

Also, never never never have these vendors work on your live site without taking a backup. Note that I'm saying you should take the backup, not the vendor - don't rely on any vendor to keep your code and site safe.

Most hosting companies do backups on a regular basis. Just ask them to restore a backup from before the changes were made.

contact your web host for the back up - it might be an option.

I highly doubt you will be able to sue him unless your contract states this, don't pay him and leave a few bad reviews and go from there.

There are programmers and then there are engineers. Not making a backup was straight up noob. I'm sure you got what you paid for though.

archon10 said:

There are programmers and then there are engineers. Not making a backup was straight up noob. I'm sure you got what you paid for though.

Click to expand...

There are bakers and there are fishmongers.

FYI, programmers and software engineers are completely different, I feel like you have made a comparison on a subject you know nothing about.

You can sue whoever you want.

It's called 'job security'. Every techie full-time, part-time, hourly, unpaid-intern etc does this.
Every single company treats their IT staff better than the CEO of their company for this very reason. You're probably lucky that's all they did [actually you may want to have someone go in and make sure that's all they did]

Next time you should consider to have a proper version control system in place.