I just ran `sudo rm -rf ~` by mistake.

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purpleidea@reddit

Keep a file named -i in your home directory. I've had mine there forever, but I also don't make this rm mistake, haha. It's still a good prevention against a buggy script.

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WildManner1059@reddit

actually it would, but not with -rf on there

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purpleidea@reddit

that wouldn't have helped with ~

Yeah, I don't know how you can do this particular variant by accident, maybe is fake. But I figured I'd mention the -i hack which prevents 99% of actual mistakes.

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Oh I can. I've been distracted before and when meaning to hit tab to list the contents of a dir so I can just use the arrow keys with the resulting output and select the folder I mean to delete, and instead hit the ~ key, but thankfully i caught the mistake before pressing enter.

(I have a bunch of keys reassigned like is ~ because I use ~ far more often than so I've got them swapped in regards to which needs shift. Same as my capslock is actually delete)

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whatisuser@reddit

That’s super bad aim! How’d you hit the bottom row when trying to press tab!?

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decay_cabaret@reddit

Bro what? The keyboard i use has esc, , tab, caps lock, shift, ctrl from top to bottom. is directly above tab.

Though my new keyboard I'm building today when the last parts arrive will be esc, tab, caps lock, shift, ctrl because it's a 5 row 60% keyboard. Esc is ` and ~ depending on whether or not I'm holding fn or shift

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whatisuser@reddit

Brain off + forget not everyone uses UK layout 🤦‍♂️

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PureBuy4884@reddit

i can imagine it happening when attempting to remove ~/something, but hitting enter too early, especially if relying on tab complete (so you’re not typing out the entire word “something”)

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agenttank@reddit

when you use * bash will go ahead and resolve it. in our case it will give back every file that maches.

ls -i file1 file2 file3 echo rm * rm -i file1 file2 file3

so it will run rm in interactive mode, meaning it will ask y or n for every deletion

did not try, but I think that's it

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DutchOfBurdock@reddit

yup..

alias rm = "rm -iv"
alias cp = "cp -iv"
alias mv = "mv -iv"

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tandycake@reddit

Does -n not work?

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CarloWood@reddit

I can not imagine that that will still work. A filename should now be quoted properly, no? Next you're telling me that if you have a file called "-rf ." ...

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I have a blog and a mentoring program.

This reminds me to set up a Snapshot config for my ~ dir, too. I believe TW doesn't do this by default.

But yeah, +2 for snapshots.

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DopeBoogie@reddit

And keeping a few weeks of daily/hourly snapshots takes up a pretty insignificant amount of space in most use cases.

Yeah that's the other side of btrfs snapshots that a lot of people overlook. Copy-on-write means you can keep as many snapshots as you wish and only the changed data takes up additional space.

So it's not like if you are using half your disk you will only be able to make a single additional snapshot. It's extremely unlikely (impossible?) that your changes between snapshots will be the entire disk, most likely each snapshot will only need a few GB at most. In cases where you say, install a 500GB game, that game only needs to be stored on disk once. The subsequent snapshots will point to the same game data, only the parts that change, such as a game update, will take up additional space on the disk.

As long as you aren't keeping all snapshots indefinitely forever then you aren't likely to see a significant cost increase when it comes to the storage required, and the benefit easily outweighs that cost!

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StretchAcceptable881@reddit

It’s also not a bad idea to have recovery medium like a USB drive in the event you take ax your entire linux system

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DopeBoogie@reddit

Yes, btrfs snapshots should not be considered a "backup" because they are on the same disk as the source.

Btrfs snapshots are a great way to roll back mistakes or other issues that could bork your system. But you should always also be making backups to an external disk and a cloud storage.

As I mentioned later in this thread, I use kopia to do both of those. Everything I care about gets backed up to both an external disk and an object-based storage server with kopia separate from the built-in btrfs snapshot behavior.

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Old-Adhesiveness-156@reddit

btrfs

Does it still have a lot of data-eating bugs?

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DopeBoogie@reddit

I haven't experienced any and btrfs is my go-to filesystem across several distros on many systems. I even use it on external disks.

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aaronjamt@reddit

FWIW, I keep snapshots indefinitely and while I do notice running out of space occasionally, I just delete a couple old snapshots when that happens and it's fine. I did move my Steam library to a separate subvolume so it's not snapshotted, and that made a huge difference.

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DuckDatum@reddit

Based on the last description, it sounds like snapshots store differences from older snapshots. Doesn’t that make the older snapshots a dependency for a full restore, even if using the latest one? How can you safely delete any of them?

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aaronjamt@reddit

Btrfs is a COW (Copy-On-Write) filesystem, so every time you save a file, it writes the new data in a new location and updates the file to point to the new location. Each snapshot just points to where on disk the files were located at that point in time, and prevents those old copies from being deleted. As a result, multiple snapshots (and even the live subvolume) can actually point to the exact same data, so unchanged files don't have to be duplicated (giving incremental snapshot support). However, each snapshot still contains references to every file in its full, unmodified form, so snapshots aren't dependent on parent snapshots like with "traditional" incremental snapshots.

Deleting a snapshot just frees up its references, which means that its storage can be used for something else (unless it's still being used by another subvolume/snapshot). Any files also contained by other snapshots will still be kept, as they're still referenced, thus allowing them to be restored later.

If you're familiar with hardlinking files, just imagine that a snapshot just hardlinks all files at that point in time, and it's pretty much the same thing.

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DopeBoogie@reddit

Yeah I also tend to keep mine indefinitely but I felt like if I didn't include that qualifier someone would have replied with a "Well actually..." about how it will eventually use up a lot of space if you keep them all indefinitely

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MyraidChickenSlayer@reddit

Well actually

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aaronjamt@reddit

Fair enough! By the way, do you back up your snapshots to another machines? I've been trying to come up with a good way to do that.

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CmdrCollins@reddit

I've been trying to come up with a good way to do that.

Btrfs has the ability to turn snapshots/subvolumes into datastreams via send/receive, and consequently tools automating that exist (eg btrbk).

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DopeBoogie@reddit

Nah I just use kopia to do remote backups, never felt the need to backup my btrfs snapshots when the kopia ones seem better suited for that anyway.

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aaronjamt@reddit

Fair enough! The reason I'm looking for a Btrfs based solution is since tools like Kopia have to rescan all your data, which takes a while, kills battery life, and makes my laptop hot. Snapshots are instant and only store a diff, but I haven't been able to find a way to (reliably) back up incremental snapshots, especially with an unreliable wifi connection and such.

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DopeBoogie@reddit

Yeah, I just figured with kopia I can set up custom ignore rules and only backup what I really need to.

It's actually very efficient, does rolling snapshots similar to btrfs, and it's written in Go.

http451@reddit

best I can do is /etc/skel

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gosand@reddit

Cron (rsync script) that gets run at 3am to a separate internal drive. Occasionally rync that to an external drive.

!<

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Gavekort@reddit

And this is exactly why I've got rm aliased to mv the target files and folders to ~/.local/Trash with a second alias 'trashman' that invokes the real rm to clear out the Trash folder.

I know this isn't helpful after the fact for your current dilemma as it doesn't unfuck your files, but it's a suggestion for how to keep it from happening again in 2058.

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JaggedMetalOs@reddit

That reminds me of the time running some C# app under mono created a folder named ~ in the current dir, which I tried to delete... Thankfully this was a server with recent backups!

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FortuneAcceptable925@reddit

I always do this when unsure:

cd <DIR>
rm -fr *
cd ..
rmdir <DIR>

That is an out of the box default for Red Hat and Fedora installations. Likely their derivatives as well but I haven't checked in a few years.

Well if it makes you feel any better, I accidentally did this while ripping a SHIT ton of my old family DVD's. I'm talking 25 year old media that was a pain in the ass to get off with DDrescue and other tools. Spent a ton of time finding PACK headers for corrupted media to remove corrupted bytes, archiving, mastering, reencoding, etc.

Kirsle@reddit

I one time did something similar but with the chmod command.

It was in my early Linux days, and I had an external hard drive formatted FAT32 for my backups and common files shared with Windows (as NTFS was still 'experimental' at the time and I didn't want that risk). When I restored files off of FAT32, they were all chmod 777 on Linux and I wanted to fix their permissions.

What I meant to run: chmod -R 644 .

What I actually ran: chmod -R 644 /

I was running it as root too for some dumb reason, and it wasn't until I got "permission errors" under /proc and things that I realized my mistake. By then, everything in /bin and /usr/bin had lost its execute permission, so the chmod command itself wouldn't work again. And anyway, all the nuanced permissions of things under /etc were hosed, so things that needed to be 600 etc. would cause problems if I tried to 'fix' all the permissions back again.

I just cut my losses and reinstalled my distro from scratch.

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Jaydeniscooolo@reddit

I did the same, had to reinstall windows

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PureBuy4884@reddit

i’m actually not too scared of running this. pretty much all of the code that i care about is tracked by git and on github already. And application config is hardened due to using NixOS + Home Manager. So literally all of my home directory is recoverable in a functional way.

Ironically, the only command without --dry-run option

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-Sa-Kage-@reddit

You got me thinking as rm ~ would just not work for 2 reasons:

-r flag missing so it wouldn't remove anything as \~ is a folder
IIRC correctly you do not have the rights to remove your home folder by default, so even if it had the -r flag it would fail due to rights

So in order to actually remove everything in your home you either had to do rm -r ~ with sudo rights (why would one sudo in their own home?) or rm -r ~/*

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Careful-Major3059@reddit

must be a different keyboard because this is not the case at all for me

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repocin@reddit

Pretty sure it's right next to enter on US layouts.

On my Swedish keyboard it's shift+7, which is just about impossible to accidentally input.

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hexsudo@reddit

Depends on keyboard lol...

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I've seen the recommendation before to alias `rm` to `rm -I` (or, if you want to be more careful, `rm -i`) to circumvent this. Personally, I triple-check commands like this before running them, but also prefer to trim files from, eg, dolphin, where I can (a) get them back from trash and (b) have to select files (and can double-check the selection). After deleting stuff, I usually double-check that that's what I wanted to do, and then empty trash.

Perhaps another option would be to use the trash mechanism from the cli - ie, create a script like this ( https://www.stefaanlippens.net/moving-files-to-the-kde-trash-can-from-the-command-line.html ) and get into the habit of doing `totrash ` over `rm `. Anyhoo, just ideas.

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1v5me@reddit

I did it on a novell server in production back in the days, i didn't expect it to actually delete anything, but big surprise it wiped everything, and the server kept running like nothing has happen. We did call in an expert to help us fix the erhm issue, and with the help of molokov commander or whatever it was called, we did manage to copy all the system files from another novell server, and viola we rebooted and everything worked :)

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Mister_Magister@reddit

My current installation has:

snapshot
Is on a mirror
is backed up to raidz server daily
which then is backed up to raidz server onsite
which then is backed up to raidz server offstie

I got so many copies. If you have 0 still, you should rethink your life choices. No mirror and no backup is literally gambling with time. It's just matter of time you'll lose data

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GrabbenD@reddit

How are you reliably handling the automation though?

My biggest difficulty with automating backups is the risk of synchronising bad data/state. For example, potential bitflips or foremost when having unknowingly deleted a file then not noticing it's missing in all recent backups until it's too late (after old ones get pruned)

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slickyeat@reddit

I have a cron job that rsyncs the data onto a separate drive. Both the src and dst have their own sets of snapshots so it's mostly for handling a worst case scenarios.

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Mister_Magister@reddit

My biggest difficulty with automating backups is the risk of synchronising bad data/state. For example, potential bitflips or foremost when having unknowingly deleted a file then not noticing it's missing in all recent backups until it's too late (after old ones get pruned)

zfs takes care of that for me. Then the servers have ECC. If there were a bitflip, scrub will catch it

You can also for example make snapshots every day and keep only last 3 days. Or you can configure backup to have shapshot from month ago, week ago, and from yesterday

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GrabbenD@reddit

u/0mnipresentz Everything is backing up at different times.

u/Mister_Magister You can also for example make snapshots every day and keep only last 3 days. Or you can configure backup to have shapshot from month ago, week ago, and from yesterday.

The theory makes sense but in practice I find there's a missing step.

Imagine you've deleted a nested document that is accessed once yearly. If the data is synchronised automatically: deduped/reflinked, scrubbed and pruned periodically (considering you might not want to keep backing up files that were purposefully deleted forever). You'd only discover the data loss the next time you try to find this document due to automation.

In other words: - How do you review the backup transactions to ensure you're backing up the correct state? - Which tools would accomplish this?

I've been considering this setup: - Syncthing to automatically backup files from Android (media) + Linux desktop (documents). - Git Annex to track incremental changes of state. - 2 different (COW) filesystems to hold the data. Either BTRFS + ZFS, or maybe LVM with BTRFS + XFS to avoid relying on a single filesystem

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Mister_Magister@reddit

Or more precisely, you're confusing backup with archival storage. Backup is to be used in case of catastrophic failure, or if you drop the database. It's not meant to be used to recover that one document that you might have deleted while sleepwalking. That's archival storage. You can use tape storage for that.

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GrabbenD@reddit

That sounds right! I'm looking for a complete architecture that doubles as a Active Backup and Archive.

Next roadblock in this puzzle would be multiseat usage. Something which multiple family members could use meaning: - $HOME on multiple Linux computers - Media storage from Android phones - Nested homelab environments (LXC/VMs/Podman Volumes)

All of these concerns and design choices make me wonder if there isn't already a platform that has solved all of these problems?

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Mister_Magister@reddit

Here's what I would do

Have one main server with raid via zfs. backup everything to it, and also have it host storage for family mambers. set up snapshots like I've described in other comment, so that you get daily, weekly, monthly and yearly snapshots.

>All of these concerns and design choices make me wonder if there isn't already a platform that has solved all of these problems

I am literally doing it? And I've described how to do it to you

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GrabbenD@reddit

Thanks!

Apart from ZFS, which software would be used to assemble all the necessary parts like automation bits / the entire "backup workflow"? E.g. cronjobs?

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Mister_Magister@reddit

systemd timers > cron thats for first

as to making snapshots… i had to grep the logs cause i didn't remember name of software i was recommended but i'm not yet using https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid

as to automatic backup from hosts, I use ansible that in turn uses rsync but there's multitude of solutions of sending data to nas so just pick one

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Mister_Magister@reddit

If I were you, I would just have server with zfs on it, and then use some software (i forgor the name of specific one) to keep progressive snapshots like daily backup, every month, and then year old snapshot. So like, snapshots are made daily. Then 7 days old snapshot gets promoted to weekly. Then if that weekly snapshot gets a month old it gets promoted to monthly, and if that gets year old it gets promoted to yearly

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Mister_Magister@reddit

>deduped/reflinked, scrubbed and pruned periodically

I don't do that

>You'd only discover the data loss the next time you try to find this document due to automation.

sure, but I've not run into such scenario where i would be sleepwalking and delete something by accident without knowing i deleted it. But then you can just keep year old snapshot

>How do you review the backup transactions to ensure you're backing up the correct state?

I don't. It is always correct state.

Create a diskimage and restore 😅

http://www.sleuthkit.org/sleuthkit/man/fls.html

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CarloWood@reddit

Last time I did that (delete my home directory with 50,000 files) I wrote ext3grep and recovered everything. My trick was to use the journal to recover the deleted inode tables, something nobody had thought of before... This idea was later ported to another tool to work with ext4. I don't know if anything like it exists for other filesystems; it might depend on how files are deleted on that fs.

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SupersonicSpitfire@reddit

On every new system I am on...

I deleted my home content in the past, and now I always perform two-step deletion in the command line: rename the file/dir with a suffix, and execute rm with tab completion (⭾⭾) to confirm that the suffix appears correctly.

bash-$ mv some_file some_file_del
bash-$ rm some_file_⭾⭾ ## this will bring me auto-completion to confirm the file to be deleted is addressed with suffix

Alduish@reddit

A solution would be to use dd to make an image of the disk and only use testdisk on the image of the disk but it also requires another disk as big as the first.

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WokeBriton@reddit

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Menem_Intergalactico@reddit

That's true, been there, done that. And that's why file recoveries needs to be saved to external storage.

That's why the only safe way to do a full DR-style restore "test" is in a truly isolated environment. As in, network has to be 100% isolated from your production environment.

Sadly, as you mentioned and also implied, the more dependent our "stacks" become upon disparate (especially third-party vendor) systems, the harder a true "DR" test restore becomes. :-(

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TabTwo0711@reddit

Friend of mine worked at a financial company who were forced by auditors to do a failover to their secondary systems to prove they are working. The failover worked. But the they realized they can’t switch back due to some details they didn’t think about. Took two years to switch Bach to primary.

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basil_not_the_plant@reddit

Every online backup software guide.

How to do backups: Example 1 Example 2 Example n How to do restores:

The end

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__nohope@reddit

https://i.imgur.com/ihA7y6b.jpeg

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twitterfluechtling@reddit

Excactly! I have a NAS and rsync the relevant folders frequently! It's mounted on login, the script runs automatically, I just mount it to ~/mnt/backup and ... aaaand ... Oh, shoot!!!

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Ciwan1859@reddit

Serious question. OP’s scenario is scary. How do I backup? What do I backup? How easy is the restore process?

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TheWorldIsNotOkay@reddit

Serious question. OP’s scenario is scary. How do I backup?

Get an external hard drive, and periodically copy all important data to it. Alternatively, set up NAS (Network-Attached Storage, basically a storage drive that can be accessed by other devices on the network) and schedule regular backups of important directories with rsync (or using a GUI front-end like GRsync or GAdmin-Rsync if you're not comfortable using the terminal).

What do I backup?

What's important to you? For starters, you'll probably want to backup your /home directory, since unless you're doing something weird that will include all of your Downloads, Documents, Music, Videos, and Photos, as well as the configuration files for the software you use.

How easy is the restore process?

Everything in Linux is a file, so... usually as simple as copying the files back over. If you backup your entire /home directory to a Linux-friendly filesystem (like Ext3 or Btrfs, but not NTFS or FAT), then all of the file ownerships and permissions should be kept intact, so if you have to reinstall your entire OS you can just copy your /home directory backup to the new /home directory. If you don't use a filesystem that retains the Linux file ownership and permissions, then you can still copy things over, but you'd just need to make sure you reset those permissions.

(Though if nothing is wrong with your current /home directory and you just want to install a different version of Linux, you can usually just choose to keep your current /home directory intact during the installation process. Backups are for when the data in the primary location is lost or corrupted.)

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SheriffBartholomew@reddit

Install Vorta and Borg. Specify your root path as the source and a different drive as the destination. Pick common exclusion rules from the settings options. Run the thing.

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elmagio@reddit

It depends, what are you most afraid of? Having to reinstall your OS > Set up with Btrfs snapshots or something like that. Losing precious files you can't easily replace > Use tools like Déjà Dup to set up backups of those important folders (pictures, documents, ...) to an external drive and/or to the cloud and run that regularly.

Restoring files should always be pretty easy, restoring system will depend on how much it got borked up.

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did_i_or_didnt_i@reddit

try ‘rm -rf /‘

bonus:

Suppose you were writing a long command, and realize you need to review something before you'd know how to end it. You can just enter the comment-ed command line into the history, then pick up where you left off, later. (CTRL-R then type some distinct part of what you'd done, before)

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theng@reddit

depends on your binds but generally:

<ctrl+a><ctrl+d> is equivalent to <home><suppr/del to the right>

I find it easier to type

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Skyhighatrist@reddit

<ctrl+a><ctrl+k> usually moves home then deletes to the end of the line. <alt+d> does one word at a time.

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jaredw@reddit

Control +d is exit usually. If there's text it deletes?

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theng@reddit

ah indeed haha it's

I never say stuff like this!

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trusterx@reddit

Urban legends. Arm won't execute rm -fr /

hugewhammo@reddit

i did that for fun on a test install years ago! worked exactly like i expected!

root@test:/# rm -rfv *

doesn't -i negate -f?

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Cool-Walk5990@reddit

Not if you append -i at the end

rm -fri /tmp/minimal.lua
rm: remove regular file '/tmp/minimal.lua'?

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wRAR_@reddit

That's what they meant.

no2gates@reddit

Been there, done that back in 1994 on an AIX system. I thought I was in a temp directory, not / and was wondering why it was taking so long to remove just a few dozen files. Stopped it before it nuked the entire system, so I still had the "tar" command to restore the full system tape backup that had just finished an hour before.

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ultraboykj@reddit

alias rm="rm -i"

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jedberg@reddit

I once did rm -rf /bin (instead of the bin in home dir).

You are not alone.

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LesStrater@reddit

No problem. Just restore your partition backup and move along...

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Intelligent-Turnup@reddit

bloodguard@reddit

Ouch. I'd like to think I'd be too cautious to do something like this but I've pulled way too many late nights to judge.

I wonder if distros could put an alias on rm such that when the recursive flag is used it asks "are you sure? - do you want me to show you what you'd be deleting with a verbose dry-run first?".

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rainpl@reddit

Why do you need sudo to remove a directory owned by yourself?

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LonelyMachines@reddit

I've never been brave enough to do this. I'm curious: where does it stop? Can rm remove itself?

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bob2600@reddit

I'd guess that it probably can because when rm is executed, it is loaded into memory so it could probably remove itself from the disk.

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hmz-x@reddit

Yes, you can do sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root and watch the fireworks.

Yes, rm can delete itself because once it is loaded into memory, it doesn't care about the file. (someone more knowledgeable than me -- I guess that's most people here -- can probably explain this better)

You don't have to be brave enough. Just dumb enough to write a quick script that does it for you.

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mikechant@reddit

I've done this for fun on a system I was about to blow away, I was impressed with how the system just kept on running, although to get it to shut down I had to use the sysrq sequence.

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LonelyMachines@reddit

Something like

 dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=4M status=progress

could do it. But I'm not that brave.

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RichWa2@reddit

DO NOT ACCESS THE PARTITION CONTAINING THE DELETED FILES!!! What file system are you using?
Inodes can be restored and the files recreated

https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1/how-to-restore-deleted-inodes-using-debugfs-898383/

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UnusuallyLargeSloth@reddit

Happens to all of us, I suppose. Tried to delete directory 'foo' in my home. Wanted to type 'rm -rf ~/foo'. Actually typed 'rm -rf ~ /foo' (note the space).

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Three_Dogs@reddit

I once nuked an SSD full of important photos while rm -rf’ing random hidden folders that didn’t even need to be touched. I was tab-completing and didn’t realize the shell would auto-complete after a few seconds. Hit enter, thinking I was confirming the directory. Nope — I rm -rf’d the entire drive.

About 80% was backed up on iCloud Photos, but that other 20% is gone forever. It honestly took me months before I could bring myself to use rm -rf again. But that’s how you learn the hard way to actually back stuff up.

For me, it snowballed into off-site backups, mirrored pools on my TrueNAS box — the works. I’ll be damned if my fat fingers ever pull that stunt again.

TL;DR: learn from your mistakes. Your sudo rm -rf ~ will not be in vain.

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meisterbookie@reddit

well, \~ != /root, /var, /lib, /etc or other really important stuff. Assuming you have a backup, no big harm.

Assuming you don't, you're fucked.

Regardless, this was the very last time you did this error. Believe me, been there, done that.

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qrushless@reddit

You just removed the french packages, dont worry!

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TryHardEggplant@reddit

It happens. I've run git reset --hard on the wrong repo and also deleted a VM on the wrong host. I now run zsh with OMYZSH with the git prompt and color coding based on different hosts (and if they are local or SSH) so I can tell exactly which window is which now.

After hearing how some KDE plugin ran rm -rf /* and still remembering bumblebee issue, I decided there are way too many incidents and made a wrapper which checks arguments for forbidden ones.

Originally it had no $HOME, but after reading this post I decided extra protection. Now I'm kinda safe:

$ rm -rf ~/
 /usr/local/sbin/rm: Arguments contain invalid arg /home/fella/
 thread 'main' panicked at src/main.rs:57:9:
 Aborting

Personally my biggest fuck up int the past was running sudo chown -R user:user .* in very old bash which included .. into expansion of .*, and it happened in my user home dir which lived outside of /home: it was in /me (I recently changed the distro, but kept my old home dir on separate hdd and it had different user id)

EtiamTinciduntNullam@reddit

It's safer to type it like this: sudo ~/path/to/the/file -rf. This way you add a potentially dangerous switch at the end.

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SheriffBartholomew@reddit

LOL!

Did you run Borg backups to a separate drive or partition like we've been telling you to do? Or GRUB Timeshift?

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p2ii5150@reddit

Sure...

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BK_Rich@reddit

Isn’t that just going to delete the root users home directory?

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Mgerkin2187@reddit

Yeah I think I'm typing the directory first from now on whenever I use rm -rf 😂

Thanks for the cautionary tale. Next time have some snapshots to fill back on.

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Obviously the following is not relevant if you are on a system with no GUI, but:

This is why, although I use the CLI a lot, I would always do anything like this in the GUI, since a file manager makes it visually clear exactly what you're doing.

This is also why, despite being fully capable of using dd to write an iso file to a USB stick, I use something like Gnome Disks to do that since again it makes it visually obvious what you are doing and makes it almost impossible to do something like accidentally write to /dev/sdb instead of /dev/sdd

And I also always use gparted for partition and file system operations even though I know how to use the CLI tools.

I think that once some people have discovered the delights of the Linux CLI, they get fixated on using it for everything rather than acknowledging that the visual obviousness of the GUI can make certain operations much less error prone.

Of course there are TUI tools which do have some of the visual advantages of GUI tools, but I find them a bit clunky; I'd probably use them if I had a system without a GUI though.

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jessecreamy@reddit

I can run it as many times as you want. Then i will recover within 6 hours

3 NAS to keep backup in my house. Didnt count to backblaze and other cloud.

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chigaimaro@reddit

I've found that the photorec commandline program for linux does a surprisingly good job of recovering recently deleted info from EXT4 partitions

You probably should fight the habit of using sudo - that command definitely shouldn't need it.

Although this isn't helpful versus what happened, it might help later:

rm ()  # must be a function, must require single answer for all targets
{
    ls -FCsd -- "$@"
    read -p 'remove[ny]? '
    if [ _"$REPLY" = "_y" ] ; then
        /bin/rm -rf -- "$@"
    else
        echo '(cancelled)'
    fi
}

This trains the user to always use the right wildcards (unlike the rm -i approach, which trains people to think they can use y/n for each item - although that usually means they'll eventually type "y" when they shouldn't have, or even yes y | rm -i which is horrifying). The habit of being right will save the user occasionally when their in some context that lacks the rm function.

The function isn't perfect, in particular, it takes a much longer one to accept "rm" options that "ls" doesn't understand. But it's generally sufficient, and as a sysadmin who stuffed something like it into all my users' environments, it radically cut down on requests to restore files, which is the whole point.

You decide. If seeing your home directory contents shown to you with "remove[ny]? " at the bottom would have saved you...

I did once rm -rf folder/ * (notice the space between / and *. It shouldn't have been there).

I was in HOME. It's on an nvme. It's fast as hell and the deletion was fast as hell. I ctrl+c -it asap, but a bunch of files were gone.

If you want or have the need to recover what’s lost, I suggest making an image of the disk and use Autopsy to recover what’s lost.

This would only work if you haven’t actually written anything over it.

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cs_forve@reddit

If you french fry when you should've pizzaed, you're gonna have a bad time

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Dinux-g-59@reddit

Linux is not Windows. If you want to destroy your system, as root you can. So...

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Pitiful-Valuable-504@reddit

since 2002, you surely have several boxes and hundreds of backups, so forget about it.

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Spiritual_Sun_4297@reddit

Once I was cleaning my home directory. I wanted to delete something. And there were multiple. So i typed rm something *. I was running on the keyboard. And by mistake I typed an extra star... Shit started deleting and i lost many of my files.

If you happen to remove your home dir, just run mkhomedir_helper <username>

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whatyoucallmetoday@reddit

I once did ‘rm -rf ~/.*’. It took me a few seconds to realized the command walked up the tree with the ‘..’ directory. Lesson learned.

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Longjumping-Youth934@reddit

How is that possible to run this command by mistake?

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DistributionRight261@reddit

Use btrfs with snapshot next time

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RedHuey@reddit

At this point, why doesn’t rm have a simple check for “-rf” when it is going to remove either the entirely of your own user or the root file system. Just a simple “are you sure?” Pretty much nobody would ever do this intentionally, and if they do intend it, what harm is there in have to answer y or n?

(I know, when the FBI is banging on the door, seconds count…)

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MountfordDr@reddit

Coincidentally I did this yesterday too! I had already done a backup of my Pictures directory which was full of photos organised into subdirectories. I intended to cd into Pictures and then ”rm -r *”. I didn't. Fortunately I managed to reconstruct it from various backups but it was a pain. The good news is that it cleared out a load of rubbish which I had been meaning to do for years!

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I have aliased "rm" to "trash" on my pc and "sudo" to "sudo " (with a trailing space)

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northparkbv@reddit

This is bait, it literally forces you to write --no-preserve-root...

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theng@reddit

it warns you on / only IIRC

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DarkKnyt@reddit

My first line backup is that I almost always use tab to auto complete. That way, I let the shell populate the rm directory vice me.

bp019337@reddit

If you don't have backups and haven't rebooted you can try to recover files by lsof and checking for deleted files and copying them to another drive. Otherwise use a file recovery tool like PhotoRec

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Forsaken-Orange9293@reddit

install trash-cli and alias rm to trash-put

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sleepingonmoon@reddit

Always ls before rm.

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IntroductionNo3835@reddit

I remember that at university a colleague studied computer science and I studied engineering. I sat next to him and watched him typing some things. He went to get something and I typed something like, erase * enter.

Well, he had to contact the administrators to retrieve something...

Today he works in administration, collects taxes and I deal with computing.

Summary of the story, I made a mistake at the right time... Kakaka

But I've deleted files by accident.

i run sudo rm -rf /*

in virtual machine

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chud_meister@reddit

Oh it's possible.

I essentially did a sudo rm -rf / on myself from a typo in a makefile I was working on

The typo was something like this:

uninstall:
      sudo rm -rf / opt/<package>

After running and rule to test it (and entering my sudo password) I had a moment of confusion watching all of the permissions errors on all the files it wouldn't rm blow by in my terminal and when I realized what was going on I mashed control + c as as fast as I could but the damage was done.

It didn't have the --no-preserve-root arg passed, so not everything was nuked, but enough random files got removed scattered as across the system that fixing it was next to impossible and I just made a backup what wasn't already in my backups and reinstalled.

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Appropriate_Net_5393@reddit

It doesn't matter what you do, tomorrow you still have to go to school

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Nevermynde@reddit

Depending on the filesystem type, there may be some "undelete" options.

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korinokiri@reddit

Look up file recovery, it's possible.

Next time install safe-rm which I believe would prevent this

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HotLingonberry27@reddit

Done this before. I did with with /. Deleted the root dir

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keaman7@reddit

I know this pain 😂.

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-Sa-Kage-@reddit

Afaik there is no simple "undo rm" command. If you don't have backups and need the data, you need to shut down system asap or at least unmount the drive if possible and either go for some data recovery software on bootable USB or pay $$$ for data recovery

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Defiant-Flounder-368@reddit

/ is quite close to <enter<>