I’m working on a some materials for a class wherein I’ll be teaching some young, wide-eyed Windows nerds about Linux and we’re including a section we’re calling “foot guns”. Basically it’s ways you might shoot yourself in the foot while meddling with your newfound Linux powers.

I’ve got the usual forgetting the . in lines like this:

$ rm -rf ./bin

As well as a bunch of other fun stories like that one time I mounted my Linux home folder into my Windows machine, forgot I did that, then deleted a parent folder.

You know, the war stories.

Tell me yours. I wanna share your mistakes so that they can learn from them.

Fun (?) side note: somehow, my entire ${HOME}/projects folder has been deleted like… just now, and I have no idea how it happened. I may have a terrible new story to add if I figure it out.

  • @YukiA
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    128 months ago

    Tip: don’t put important things in just 1 place.

    That aside!

    Years ago when I first tried out Linux (I was around the age of 10), I didn’t really pay much attention while installing Linux back then, so I wiped my entire data disk D:…

    • Random Dent
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      fedilink
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      edit-2
      8 months ago

      I like the 3-2-1-1-0 backup rule personally.

      tl;dr:

      • 3 copies of your data
      • on 2 different media
      • at least 1 offsite copy
      • 1 copy offline (preferably air-gapped)
      • 0 errors (IE verified backups)

      (For the super important stuff, obviously. I’m more lax about other things.)