At work, whenever I do an rm -rf on -anything-, I sit down on my hands and CAREFULLY read what I've typed, then re-read it, THEN hit ENTER.

The habit has saved my ass more than once.

And locking down access and copying to things has resulted in this kind of loss countless times. It's really really easy to screw up a backup or have something catastrophically fail due to flood, fire, theft, anything.....and then you're SOL unless someone keeps their own copies because they are super paranoid usually without permission or against standards.

It's good practice The original advice from the early Unix days was to wait for one second before hitting return on any rm line (particularly as root)... that just about gives your brain a chance to say "waaaiiiitttt!" if it's not right.

I doubt the files would've really been gone after 20 seconds, but it might've been weeks of work to get them back. The unofficial offsite backup was a better option here, for sure.
>> ^StukaFox:

At work, whenever I do an rm -rf on -anything-, I sit down on my hands and CAREFULLY read what I've typed, then re-read it, THEN hit ENTER.
The habit has saved my ass more than once.

Right after starting on university, I was setting up some software I wanted in my home directory. To the configure script I passed "--prefix=~", meaning "install to the home directory". However, the script didn't recognize the tilde as meaning home, and created a directory named "~" where everything was installed.

You can guess what happened next.

rm* is so much easier to fuck up than format c: /q

Pixar has no (official) backup redundancy? noobs