this post was submitted on 13 May 2026
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In the immortal words of Daniel Rutter (again): If nothing else, backups are necessary because at some point in your life you will confidently instruct your computer to destroy your data.
i just deleted a month of notes by doing:
find $(pwd) "*.tmp" -delete
instead of:
find $(pwd) -iname "*.tmp" -delete
turns out the former throws an error on "*.tmp" but still deletes everything lol... PSA for everyone
why $(pwd) instead of just
.?i changed it so that ppl on lemmy who may not be familiar with the syntax of find could read it easier? maybe it made it more confusing
I think it's your fault if you don't have backups... but I legitimately think that we should restrict usage of classic Unix tools to scripts, and use safer tools ourselves... but I guess that's just my opinion.
yeah i didnt want to script removing the tmp files bc theyre sometimes useful... usually i do read;find -delete; as like a "confirm" for me...
also, i do backup, but i guess only once a month... i was in the middle of a backup, the commands were: git add --all; git commit; find -delete; git push; and then confusion when i saw the .git folder was gone
ive been doing this for over a decade and this is the second (third?) time something like this has happened.
anyway, not trying to defend myself, maybe i should script the find and delete thing... but i just wanna hopefully prevent someone else's data deletion.
Damn! That's a brutal one. Someone should maybe change that behavior.
A few years ago I deleted my whole home folder by bind-mounting it inside a chroot. When I was done with the chroot, I
rm -rf-ed it without unmounting my home first.Been there, done that.
I was lucky last time, was able to reconstruct almost all of it (99.7%) in 3 weeks of after-work messing around. The 0.3% is non-critical.
Now I do something I wrote myself with cron, rsync, hardlinks and gpg. It's simple, easy to test and fairly bulletproof. Protip: keep many backups of your keys or you'll wish you had.
Syncthing (distributed folder sharing including “keep x copies of each file”) and duplicity (gpg-encrypted, incremental backup anywhere) are your friends.
Been using them for a very, very long time. A++ open source, cross-platform solutions.
Yeah, I was hesitant to encrypt backups for a long time, and now I have the problem that you can't store backups of encryption headers on the encrypted device(s)