this post was submitted on 13 May 2026
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Not to be that guy, but that's 100% on you for not having backups of important work. It's 3 years and your fucking research dissertation, how the fuck do you keep that all in one place?
This time you got fucked by Microsoft for having shit software. But it could have been your hardware that exploded, your house catching fire, your shit being stolen, you downloading malware from that one site you told your girlfriend you'd never visit again, shitty infrastructure causing power issues or flooding, you yourself having a nervous breakdown and nuking the thing.
Keep everything important at least in three places, one of which should be in a physically different (remote) place. Backup often, keep to the schedule and test your backups.
Jeez man, using Microsoft software and not having backups is like walking around with a loaded gun pointed at your dick. It's all well and good till you get your dick blown off.
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
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.