ZFS and dotfiles are your friend. Sorry for your loss.
this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2024
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Here's a rule I learned the hard way a few decades ago:
- If you type "rm", take you hands off the keyboard and take one deliberate breath before continuing your command.
- If you then type "-r", do it again.
- If you then type "-f" do it again.
- In all cases, re-read what you wrote before hitting ENTER.
Or have backups (lol)
AND have backups.
In the few years of me exclusively using the command line to manage files, even having rm aliased to rm -rf, and at some point to sudo rm -rf, out of convenience, I think it has happened thrice that I deleted the wrong file, and twice I was able to restore it with (hourly) backups. The third time, it was a minecraft world which I had created to test some mods and the server start script, and I had excluded it from backups because my ~/games dir is usually only used by steam.
Tipps to prevent future accidents:
- Set up BTRFS snapshots with Timeshift or Snapper. Switching to BTRFS is worth it for snapshots alone.
- Do regular backups on a device that can not be reached by rm: vorta local on external hdd that you connect once a week OR vorta/borg2 to a NAS/Server that does BTRFS snapshots itself OR Nextcloud to sync to a server that has a trashbin OR git to a server. Just remember that Nextcloud and git are unencrypted, so the server has to be secure and trustworthy. Vorta and borg2 can be set up with encryption.
Mistakes are unpreventable due to our error-prone brains, but it is a choice to repeat them.
You're just the latest member of a long and storied fraternity of the best worst operating system architecture.
https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf
One of us...
I’m a complete moron,
You are not,
Every person learning with the hardway isnt a moron,
You have to do, to really learn,
I should’ve had that backed up
Absolutely! IT's time to check out Stow now. With this you can easily manage your configuration and dotfiles (and all other data) in a single location.
https://venthur.de/2021-12-19-managing-dotfiles-with-stow.html
I should’ve […] used trash
For those who don’t know: trash-cli
What an awesome tool that I wish I knew sooner. Also the && operator in sh. I think you can figure out what happened.
Also the && operator in sh. I think you can figure out what happened.
I'm guessing something like... Copy file/dir from location A to location B and then delete from A, but the copy had failed (and the delete unfortunately worked fine)?
It upsets me to no end that this isn't a standard package 😭
I should have had backups of important files in my home directory
Lessons learned the hard way
if your session is still running you can use env to help reconstruct it
But... why?
Can you say why were you trying to rm -r your .cache anyway? Also RIP.
Probably the number one cause of borked Linux systems - trying to "de-bloat".
Save space probably
Reason's I never use auto-complete in the terminal. Sadly, that's sometimes not enough.
Reasons no have backups more like. No need to make life hard
just be careful and review what tab-suggest shows.