I was doing command line stuff while tweaking on coffee and having a bit of an anxiety attack and I accidentally deleted my home directory.
But I have automated daily snapshots saved which is a ZFS feature. And I was able to simply restore from the latest snapshot which was from this morning. So this is the first time ever that I got any benefit from being on ZFS.
I accidentally deleted my home directory.
You’re coming off way too casual about this
probably because they restored it
how does one sccidentally delete home directory? I know that it happens but how!
The gist is this:
- I was using a terminal file manager called nnn
- You can make bulk selections in it using the space key
- However, unlike a graphical file manager, selections across directories persist. Like if you select some things in
dir1
, then traverse todir1/..
and select stuff there, the selections indir1
will persist. In hindsight this sounds like an antifeature. - Due to frantic key presses I accidentally traversed to
/home
and selected/home/name
- Then I traversed to the actual directory where I wanted to make the selections, did that and deleted the selections
- It was unknown to me that
/home/name
was also selected - nnn just executes shell commands to perform deletions. In my shell profile
rm
is aliased torm -iv
so the output conveyed to me what was going on (my home directory was being nuked) - I ctrl+c’d the operation and restored my $HOME from the snapshot
A cautionary tale for all those out there who wish to use meme software.
It’s pretty good when it’s not nuking your $HOME
Here is why setup is superior:
- sunk cost fallacy
Yup, I know the feeling. That’s why it can be nice to start fresh with a new installation or new distro.
Asahi Lina proves this. Utterly incomprehensible system programming streams
I’d recommend installing
trash-cli
or something equivalent as welli will do so, didn’t know about it 👍
zfs is a great piece of software for sure. used it on freebsd in the past