Accidentally wiped a 250Gig partition with my entire music and video collection on it and about 3 years worth of emails and ICQ logs.

done that too
did it to a friend of mine by accident with a 1TB hard drive with irreplaceable photos of friends of his that had passed on, not pretty.

Member Response
 

Hi,

I told my students to always 'Measure twice & cut once'. Check & re-check are both good rules to use everyday if you do not want a 'gotcha moment'. ©

Have fun & enjoy!
:hattip:

Hey, Gary! You seem to have become obsessed with copyrighting everything. ©
:D ©

I once wiped Slackware 13.1 from my laptop just because I couldn't get the Broadcom wireless to work on that. It took me almost an year to come back to 13.37. I was an idiot.

Oh and once I logged in to one of my organization's production DB server using root and did some unspeakable things. :D

Regards.

I tend to make myself feel like an idiot every day at least once.

Two fridays ago I was trying to get home (180km away) but I needed to print a 7' banner I'd made before going home and the f'ing thing would only print partially half to be exact. I futzed and futzed eventually I turned the banner into a poster figuring I'd just print 3 and it still would only print half the image. I finally said F'it and I went home about half way through the drive home I realized I was trying to print to my plotter at 600 dpi which it won't do ( thanks Ps for keeping the last setting) so the Sunday before my daughters birthday I got to make the 360km commute to print off that stupid banner. Needless to say my wife was less than pleased and there is nothing worse than a pissed off German woman.

Yes, that's what I always do. Being mildly obsessive, I'm naturally a double-checker (and even triple-checker). But even so, I've had a few dumb moments :).

Member Response
 

Hi,

And the problem is.... :)

No problem...a bit strange, that's all. ©
:)©

I've pulled every bone head move there is.
It's what has made me the SysAdmin I am today.

Luckily for me, I fix way more than I break.

Using --checksum with rsync...my server is slow to begin with, and that one little flag made it a whole lot worse.

I did the same thing a couple weeks ago. Tried to sync 3TB of data with the --checksum flag. Woke up 7 hours later to find only about 5 files had been synced.

Before I looked at the usernames, I thought for sure that you were the one who started this thread: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...on-4175509597/

Thought I was in ~/bin once, and wanted to clear it out, so I ran "rm -f *". Turns out I was in /bin, and was logged in as root.

I ctrl+c'd within about 5 seconds, but by then I had already lost basically the entire directory, including cp, mv, vi, etc.

Luckily I had another system with the same OS nearby and was able to scp the contents of /bin over, fixing the problem.




Another stupid issue that I've run into MANY times is a result of auto completion putting a space after the file when it matches it. I would want to remove all files with the same prefix, so I would type
When there is more than one file matching that prefix, it's fine. The tab matches out to the end of the common prefix, then the * tells it to match all of the files with that prefix. When there is ONE file matching that prefix, the auto completion puts a space after it, and the command becomes
Which, of course, means "remove nameoffile, as well as everything else in the cwd".

I probably made that mistake 4-5 times before I finally got fed up enough that I modified my bash auto-completion rules so that when I'm running rm, it doesn't put a space after the match.

Seems like the formatting drive thing is the common story, I'll add mine.

I had built a Debian Live image for a USB stick which I use at work. Usually I turn the laptop on, plug in the USB stick, and dd the image. All of my partitions are on the single laptop hard drive (sda)

This time, I threw the USB stick in first, and boot. Everything boots fine. Get to a terminal, and
Then I realize it's late, and will do this tomorrow instead. I Ctrl+C the dd process, and proceed to shutdown. First, I eject the USB stick.

HUH??? WHAT??? That ain't right!!!

run dmesg, and it turns out for whatever reason, the USB stick was detected as /dev/sda. Insert expletive here. Since when???

Turns out I had written about half of a gig to the laptop's hard drive. Yup. That sucks.

Fortunately the EFI partitions were first, followed by the root partition. home, usr and etc were unharmed.

I learned a lot about successfully recovering a GPT the next few days. Reinstalled Debian and was back in business. No data recovery needed as I was able to put the partitions back in place.