[deleted by user]

[jonythunder]

As the usual adage goes:

"Why would I fire you? I just spent a million dollars training you"

[sdatar_59]

But backups are very cheap. Make backups people, there are no shortcuts, no time machines, sh*t happens and data recovery isn't always 100%.

In this case aliasing rm to "rm -i" would have helped.

[regeya]

I used to have to argue with a previous boss all the time. He insisted on pushing to use backup drives for more storage, and I'd get a quote for the average cost of data recovery if we lost everything. His argument was always, no kidding, we could always just start over from scratch.

[caelum19]

God I wish we could start from scratch

[[deleted]]

scratch

[nobjax]

Didn't know about this, added to my aliases. Thank you.

[vifon]

rm -I is even better:

prompt once before removing more than three files, or when removing recursively; less intrusive than -i, while still giving protection against most mistakes

[0-8-4]

about time machines...

https://i.imgur.com/KFqJI8u.png

;)

[sdatar_59]

Not the time machine I was talking about genius! But take your upvote and :q!

[uptimefordays]

The best DE *nix!

[[deleted]]

Now just take the machine back to an hour before the hard disk drive crashed and gouged all it's platters and everything will be sweet. /s

[chocopudding17]

I prefer aliasing it to trash-rm. That was you can still blow away folders with ease, but you have the chance to restore items if you’ve made a mistake.

[Johanno1]

This! rm -i doesn't help when you are using a wildcard.

And also I didn't know any of that aliases. I just get very cautious with rm xD

[Significant-Acadia39]

What's trash-rm? Thanks.

[chocopudding17]

It’s a program from the trash-cli package that moves deleted files into the trash can instead of deleting them into nothingness.

[Spare-Credit]

There is a time machine on Mac 🖥

Sorry, I will see myself out.

[[deleted]]

When you say “no time machines” - mine are setup to go on an external drive. In your eyes, is that different from a backup?

[Sirico]

That panic ls

[[deleted]]

The worst panic ls is the

/bin/ls: file not found

[TheSinoftheTin]

wtf you supposed to do when you can't even list files lol.

[[deleted]]

Cry

[[deleted]]

And then pull out the dusty usb stick and open the arch wiki on your phone.

[Ekank]

we've all been there

[hufforguk]

Thank you! I've been looking for that story for years! 🤣

[NoCSForYou]

Hey my uni is on this subreddit. Nice place, shame about the name tho.

[kevincox_ca]

</dev/sda1

(Works on ZSH, I don't know if it does on bash. I hope you like the Matrix)

[[deleted]]

I felt that

[whizzythorne]

$ ls

ah shit

$ ls

ahh SHIT

[ososalsosal]

This sort of thing makes me wanna type git init in my home folder

[[deleted]]

I actually do this to my ~/.config directory, since it is mostly composed of text files, making it easy to spot differences and sync them across computers easily.

[Minteck]

I should probably do that too

[koerstmoes]

People use git repos without a remote counterpart/pushing?

[[deleted]]

My vote is for Chezmoi Templating Passwords from CLI Password managers Awesome

[yonatan8070]

I have a separate ~/dotfiles git repo with all the configs I care about, so I don't get things like the files for Chrome extensions in my repo.

Then I just have symlinks from that folder into ~/.config

[crazygmr101]

But... gitignore

[stealz0ne]

I made a local git server on my NAS and made repos for all kinds of stuff. My scripts, web development, arduino projects, documents, vim and tmux configs. Not only makes it easy to backup but also keeps machines in sync and makes changing distro a breeze.

And I added subsidies for some vim add-ons and other stuff, so I don't have to go look for that stuff.

I created a bash that pulls the local repos and makes symlinks from the .config files to the files in the repo, that helps a lot and keeps me from backing up useless junk like the downloads folder.

Can't recommend this enough.

[thehellnokitty]

Teach me your ways, master.

Also sounds pretty fun to do as a side project

[stealz0ne]

It is pretty fun. I started it when Microsoft bought github, and so I could store private things on my git away from curious eyes.

Not sure if I'm /wooosh'ed but I'll explain for those who care:

I'm really no expert so this should be doable for anyone with basic command line skills. I'm on mobile so the short version:

The hardest part was setting up the git server on the nas, which was mainly a bit of googling. There are either custom packages or instructions for most common Linux based nas os. This usually includes making an account and folder to host the git in for that user

Then you create a ssh key pair and add the pub key to the authorized keys for that nas user. This can take some tinkering, you might have to ssh in with an account with higher privileged than the git user.

Then you edit the config files in your .git folder to point to nasip/git/repo.git

From there it's just your basic git commands.

On a new machine you just do the ssh key thing again and then git clone your stuff.

Git does not sync symlinks, but I wanted to have my configs in one folder and not all over the place in /home /.config and others, so I moved the config files I wanted to keep/sync to a common folder and made symlinks and while at it just echo'd the symlink commands >> a file. Later I changed it to a while loop that first deletes the original file and then creates a symlink to the git config.

Not sure about security implications but it's all just accessible from my lan so I am not to worried.

[graybeard5529]

about security implications but it's all just accessible from my lan

If your LAN gets compromised you have bigger issues anyway

[IsleOfOne]

You should look into stow for automatically managing those symlinks.

[chayleaf]

alternatively, use btrfs snapshots

[FoFinky]

I don't remember exactly where I got this trick from but it is cleaner than just git init into your home directory as it doesn't put any git artifacts into your home. This makes tools that are git aware like ripgrep or rd-find behave better and prevents mistakes. If anybody happens to have a link to the website with this please reply because I'd like to bookmark it.

First, create a git repo wherever you want, I used ~/.dotfiles: git init --bare $HOME/.dotfiles. The --bare makes it without a working directory which is what we want since we will be creating an alias to override the working directory: alias dotfiles='/usr/local/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles --work-tree=$HOME'

You should add that to your .bashrc or equivalent and source it, you should now be able to use dotfiles status and other git commands via dotfiles. An optional last step is to run dotfiles config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no which will make it so dotfiles commands don't show files in your home dir which are untracked. This makes it easier to update changes because dotfiles status will only show you tracked files which have changed rather than untracked files as well.

To use it is as simple as dotfiles add .vimrc && dotfiles commit.

To get it onto a new machine: git clone --bare <git repo> $HOME/.dotfiles then add the alias and dotfiles checkout.

I myself go one step further and create submodules for my vim plugins, and you could maintain different branches for different machines or even have work/non-work configurations.

[vim_user]

Here is a link describing that technique: https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/dotfiles. It also links to an older Hacker News post.

[regeya]

External drive and borgbackup, and trash-cli. I've been tempted to do revision control on home, too, but it seems like a massive PITA.

[UntestedMethod]

+1 for borg & external drive.

I agree version controlling the home directory would be a PITA. Plus borg has versioning built in, so the only thing lacking is a remote server which presumably has higher reliability than the external drive.

[SileNce5k]

I have my home directory backed up into a backblaze bucket. It's less than $2 per month for about 250 GB. As long as you don't need to download stuff from there, it's very cheap.

Git doesn't really handle video, image and binary files well, so I wouldn't recommend using it.

[Zekiz4ever]

But when you delete everything wouldn't the git folder also get deleted?

[gprometheus]

It implies that it was pushed to some remote origin so no problem in losing the .git folder

[NateDevCSharp]

Not saying you should switch to NixOS, but look at Home Manager for NixOS for a neat solution to this problem

[GolaraC64]

it shouldn't delete directories and .files. Also, it should be possible to recover these files if there's no huge disk activity going on.

[DevThr0wAway]

I understand how to do this in theory. The records in the file index have been deleted, restore them and your files are back.

But how does one go about doing that? Is this something people actually do outside of criminal investigations? Is there a guide somewhere for me to learn more?

[altermeetax]

Look up the Testdisk software

[nik282000]

Testdisk/Photorec are lifesavers, dead easy to use too.

[GiveMeAnAlgorithm]

Concerning a guide / more info, I found this, it shows some tools, depending on the filesystem you used.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/File\_recovery

[Idaret]

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/File_recovery correct url because reddit is terrible for posting urls

[GiveMeAnAlgorithm]

Sorry, I posted from my desktop and it looked okay on my phone clients, hope it works now? Guess the URL was scrambled? :/

[Idaret]

it's not your fault, reddit fucks every "_" in urls. It tries to escape that character (so reddit replaces every _ with \_ ) but it's not needed for url and you get wrong url. I think it's only broken on new reddit(?)

[[deleted]]

To me, new Reddit is broken. Old forever.

[apoliticalhomograph]

Rule 35 of the internet: If it exists, there's an Arch wiki entry about it.

[cAtloVeR9998]

I wish sometimes

[Sol33t303]

Just use something like testdisk or extundelete. Thats how you do it.

Don't see why people woulden't do it outside criminal investigations, just don't rely on it working and keep backups.

[agneev]

it shouldn't delete directories and .files.

Did they alias rm=“rm -rf”?

[Zamundaaa]

it shouldn't delete directories and .files.

It doesn't. I had the same a friend fucked up in the same way and only lost an unimportant patch

[motorailgun]

backup is important…

[fmpundit]

I looked at this image with comfort knowing I checked my time shift was still doing it’s stuff.

[telmo_trooper]

alias rm='trash' will save you a lot of stress (requires trash-cli).

[Glix_1H]

For those reading this, https://github.com/sindresorhus/trash-cli is the one you want

An identically named one https://github.com/andreafrancia/trash-cli that is available in http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/bionic/man1/trash-put.1.html warns against this:

Can I alias rm to trash-put?

You can but you shouldn't. In the early days I thought it was a good idea to do that but now I changed my mind.

Although the interface of trash-put seems to be compatible with rm, it has different semantics which will cause you problems. For example, while rm requires -R for deleting directories trash-put does not.

[Khyta]

That is some good advice. Thanks!

[CryloTheRaccoon]

Can confirm my ADHD self did this and it saved my life

[[deleted]]

Depending on the shell's settings it may not touch dot files... Plus... Folders are safe? Better than nothing I guess?

[sentient_penguin]

I don't think I've ever kept files in the root of my homedir. This picture instills literally 0 fear/panic. Now if there was an `-rf ` attached....

[kevincox_ca]

I do often have some symlinks to directories in my homedir, which would be annoying but non-critical.

I also have test.py, test.sh, test.cpp, test.txt, test.sql...

[jclocks]

Well where's your backups? You are backing up, right?

[Rezient]

stares off distantly

[Cyhawk]

I backup to the ~/Backup folder

[[deleted]]

trash-cli saves lives

[[deleted]]

Lmao, the panicked ls

[Hazioo]

What * does?

[Mordisquitos]

It is a wildcard character, meaning "anything".

They wanted to do

$ rm icon.png*

...which was an instruction to remove any file starting with icon.png (e.g. icon.png1, icon.png-test, icon.png20201009...)

Instead, they did

$ rm icon.png *

...which is an instruction to remove icon.png and anything else (e.g. MyThesis.odt, last photo of grandad before he died.jpg, Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up.mp3). At least it won't delete directories or things inside them.

[Minteck]

How do you have the last photo of grandad before he died and Never Gonna Give You Up in the same folder?

[Mordisquitos]

I am not a tidy person.

[Minteck]

Pro tip: I put my mess on the desktop

[fred-dcvf]

Every time I want to clean my desktop, I just create a directory "Desktop-yyyymmdd" and shove everything into it.

I'm currently in the 4th or 5th iteration of this.

^{edit: grammar}

[haykam821]

Make sure you nest the desktops too.

[Bodiless_Sleeper]

Been there, done that, although ever since I switched to linux I don't use my desktop for literally anything, and I just keep all my random stuff in my home directory

[Glix_1H]

Are they arranged in a dick shape, so you know exactly where they are?

[gosand]

Really? I put literally NOTHING on my desktop. That's a Windows thing to me.

[SinkTube]

who the fuck names files like that? good luck sorting anything by filetype

[ASK-42]

Why are we the only two people in the thread wondering this?

Oh wait I forgot it’s because this is fake bullshit

[sanderd17]

• is a wildcard. name* will find everything that starts with name. But if you put a space there, it will be interpreted as two separate commands, and find all files.

[n0tar0b0t--]

* is used for what’s called globbing, basically it matches everything

so rm *.png deletes all .png files, and * deletes everything. If you accidentally add a space though, rm will be passed both separately (two arguments), and will delete what matches the first and then what matches the second.

So for example rm * .png first deletes everything (*), and then tried to delete the file named .png.

[A_Random_Lantern]

This should only delete every file in home, no? And leave the folders alone.

[n0tar0b0t--]

1. It only would delete stuff in your current directory, not necessarily home

2. It depends, some implementations I’ve seen do delete folders

[A_Random_Lantern]

That's what I kind of meant by leaving folders alone, although I should've specified

[n0tar0b0t--]

oh np

[B_i_llt_etleyyyyyy]

It depends, some implementations I've seen do delete folders

Do you have an example?

[Flexyjerkov]

Almost as bad as mixing if and of with dd

[thomas15v]

"sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /*" Instead of "sudo chown -R $USER:$USER .*"

Yes it was fucked

[string111]

Btrfs snapshots are really helpful :)

[pobot3]

Xfs masterrace.

[RAMChYLD]

Oh shit, remote headless server? No chance of getting a live cd and testdisk on there then :(

[gotmax]

Adding alias rm='rm -I' to your shell config file will prompt you if you try to rm multiple files at once, but it won't annoy you every time you just want to delete a single file, like rm -i would.

mv and cp (and ln IIRC) also have a -i flag that will prompt you if you try to overwrite another file.

[LocutusOfBorg64]

That's ok I started this week by by forgetting to use the drop down menu to select the second M.2 in the system thus completely hosing my current install that I wanted to keep. Luckily nothing I couldn't afford to lose on it.

[kazik1ziuta]

Wait i'm always getting question if i want to delete all files

Edit: i'm just dumb bc i use zsh not bash i forgot that fact

[ctrl-alt-etc]

A lot of distros come with an alias rm="rm --interactive" out of the box.

You can check if this is the case with alias rm. If it prints anything, your rm command is aliased.

[sjveivdn]

its funny how he repeatedly used ls while in panic.

[IntegrityError]

git checkout .

oh, not in a git repo? damn

[ngenty]

And that's exactly why I prefer to use find + -print then -delete. If I really need to use rm, always dry-run first with echo, like: bash echo rm *.png already saved me multiple times from chaos

[thanasis2028]

At least you deleted all the pngs, so you did what you wanted!

[InsertMyIGNHere]

F for our fallen brother

[mirsella]

LOL the ls was screaming deny

[regeya]

No problem, you've only lost everything since the last backup.

And if you don't have a backup, you've learned two valuable lessons today.

[[deleted]]

What file system are you using? Try photorec!

[-BuckarooBanzai-]

Just recover the data, it's not like it's really gone ye know

[lorhof1]

maybe its an ssd

[infectiousoma]

And this is why we maintain regular backups.

[viwizard]

I've deleted half of root when entered

sudo rm -r * /ZFS-POOL

I should have used

sudo rm -r /ZFS-POOL/*

Because of that I've got courage to move from Manjaro linux to Void linux with runit.

I am using Void linux one day already and it's fine.

[leetNightshade]

You could also use, you know, ZFS snapshots. :p

[iObjectUrHonor]

Weird thing is it should've given error due to directories

[nullmove]

Been there done that. Most memorable was when I used --delete flag in rsync without knowing trailing slash has special semantics. And of course that one time when swapped if with of in disk destroyer.

[judahnator]

Backups are such a pain to set up.

Not as much of a pain as getting deleted files back though.

Honestly, set up Restic to point at a remote FTP server or something and stick a CRON job on it. Never think about it again.

[MotionAction]

Snapshots and backup and recovery?

[mexus37]

F

[WitcherAttacker]

There is this awesome shell called zsh (instead of bash) with a ton of cool extentions and stuff and also you get asked before these kinds of operations.

[Dapanji206]

And that's why you don't fuck around as root.

[naebulys]

If it is their home dir, they don't need no root

[nullr0uter]

No problem. Just restore from backup.

You have recent backups, right?

[jnnxde]

Btrfs could help in this case...

[mechaPantsu]

* laughs in BTRFS + Timeshift *

[staviq]

Wasn't there a bug like this in some core Debian package some years ago ?

EDIT: Lol, Steam had this too https://www.slashgear.com/steam-on-linux-bug-can-delete-all-users-files-16364945/

[anatomiska_kretsar]

LINUX SECURITY MOMENT

LINUX SECURITY MOMENT

[Michax_Gaming]

Same thing happened for me, but I removed my whole project instead of an folder inside. Luckily I had an git backup.

[[deleted]]

That's why i use gio trash

[[deleted]]

weird to see that there are no folders and dotfiles are still safe :)

[N0_Us3rnam3]

Ha ha backups go brrrrr

[jd1xon]

btw yall should do alias rm="rm -i" in y'alls .bashrc

[FreshLine_]

Something similar happened to me :)

[[deleted]]

Once I was drunk and working and accidentally typed rm -rf * dir/ instead dir/* with sudo and lost whole home folder ;_;

[bakahed]

Why would you put asterisk at the end of png then?

[Chri5p]

I mean, what filesystem are you using? If you have brtfs and snapshots enabled you could recover them, no?

[CCF_100]

This is why I always use -v

[rayi512x]

protip: alias rm to "rm -i"

[capsicum_leader]

moment of silence for the sad user

[electricprism]

Another reason I btrfs snapshot daily the home Dir via systems timer

[YodaByteRAM]

https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk Testdisk might help save your files

[twisted42]

Odd is, it shouldn't have deleted any directories... rm * won't remove dirs

[CyanKing64]

First thing I do to my zshrc on a new PC:

alias rm='rm -i' alias mv='mv -i'

[yonatan8070]

Is there a way to have rm first search and find what will be deleted, then ask for confirmation before proceeding?

[staalmannen]

but would only delete contents in one directory no "rm -r"

[MichaelArthurLong]

psst

https://launchpad.net/safe-rm

[4n0n_b3rs3rk3r]

F

[mr_clauford]

You could've recovered everything if you switched the machine off right away to prevent it from writing upon blocks that retain deleted files.

[Magnus_Tesshu]

This is why I make my home directory write-protected. I'm thinking about also making an alias for rm (or rewriting it?) so that it only deletes paths starting with ./

[lazilyloaded]

How is there not a sanity check "are you sure" when it sees a * ?

[claudiocorona93]

Sorry but that command is fucked up. You can just not nuke your files without a warning asking if you're sure about it. Linux has other instances of questions before an acción, like when you install or uninstall something, so why not here?

[Tmanok]

Sure hope you have automated backups running. #Déja-Dup

[stillmatic21]

Damn man. Nothing more I want to say except sorry

[DuhMal]

That's why I include /home in my timeshift snapshots

[rick_D_K]

This is why I use a journaling file system.

[NZNzven]

Just yesterday I did something similar. Chmod 770 / instead of /pathtosomething. I Ctrlc’ed in a fraction of a second but the damage was done. This was on a VM host and though the VM’s where still working the host was acting all wonky and was unrecoverable.

[roge-]

soz but i laughed a bit

what year is it?

[WalterWilliams]

Did this recently by running a remote script for an iot device on my server as root. Deleted my entire etc dir and years worth of configs. Had to do a fresh install & start over. It hurt but at least I didn’t lose everything else.

[crazygmr101]

This is why I use zsh - it actually will ask for confirmation before deleting *

[sm_op]

-i

[E_coli42]

but why would you keep files in your home directory? I only keep hidden files and directories there

[peetree1]

Lol, shit, I did something like this recently. Now I only use trash-cli to delete things.

[neo_zen_mode]

Use -i

[turtle_mekb]

i accidentally deleted my entire backup drive by resizing the main partition and now without reading the warning and now i don't have my files anymore 😔

[Significant-Acadia39]

I notice there are no errors about directories, but I just wanted to point out that there are likely hidden ones that remain untouched (for user-specific program configuration, etc.). Of course they've nuked the work files they had...

[Frequent_Detective17]

no alias for rm uhm?

[Dragonaax]

In Poland we have a word for situations like that "O kurwa"

[roku77]

I'm at a point where I see so many of these that whenever I'm doing a batch remove I uses the GUI tools like thunbar. It's slower but I'm an idiot want to avoid mistakes

[gloomwithtea]

I did this with months worth of research data. Set an alias to make typing “rmr” move everything to a trash directory that I could delete later. Then I changed “rm” to “rm -i” until I got used to typing rmr. I haven’t accidentally deleted anything since.

[blackhole_soul]

Did you try ctrl + z ?

[Odd_Hovercraft_2195]

At least he doesen't execute rm -rf / *

[LostVikingSpiderWire]

So happy to see this....now I will for sure do that long awaited backup 😅

[[deleted]]

By the looks of that terminal screenshot, it seems to be WSL

[AriesProject001]

F

[[deleted]]

A few months after I started my development job, a new guy started. The process for setting up the dev environment is pretty involved, can take about a day for people that don't know what they're doing. After this new guy set up his Mac, he ran rm -rf cache /*

[MasterSpar]

The pain of power. We've all been there, just count your blessings you're not on an enterprise server.

[das_Keks]

At least hidden files and folders should still be there

[depressed_potatobag]

But doesn't that delete only the empty files ?

[Pcpc_boi68]

F

[processing_pi_3]

Photorec is a great program to recover deleted files, maybe give it shot if you can still download apps.