As the title says. I put the wrong value inside a clean up code and I wiped everything. I did not push any important work. I just want to cry but at least I can offer it to you.
Do not hesitate to push even if your project is in a broken state.
I wanted to publish a tiny utility I created to GitHub (you know, it might be useful to someone else...). Before that, I wanted to some cleanup, rebasing/squashing a bit, etc. In the middle of that:
$ git checkout featurebranch
The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by checkout:
.gitignore
.idea/…
etc...
Oh, sure, no problem…
$ rm -rf * .*
$ git checkout featurebranch
fatal: not a git repository (or any of the parent directories): .git
D’oh! (Never mind, it probably wouldn't have been useful to anyone else, anyway.)
I always like to say "push it to the limit" and then I have this homer Simpson with muscle body sitting on his super couch (I forgot which TV series the Simpsons made Satire of) picture in my head 🤣
Use it as an opportunity to learn how to better store and edit your code (e.g. a VCS and a smart-ish editor). For me, a simple Ctrl-Z would be enough to get my code back.
I got the absolutely beautiful "argument list too long" in return.
I had a backup. But holy shit I'm glad the directory had thousands of files in it and nothing happened. First time I got that bash error and was happy.
I usually have rm aliased to "trash" or whatever that cli based recycle bin is. But just installed a new OS and ran this on a NAS folder today by mistake.
My dad once rm -rf’ed his company’s payroll server by accident. He was a database admin at the time. He was asked to make a quick update to something. Instead of running it as a transaction (which would have been reversible) he went “eh it’s a simple update.” He hit Enter after typing out the change for the one entry, and saw “26478 entries updated”. At that point, his stomach fell out of his asshole.
The company was too cheap to commit to regular 3-2-1 backups, so the most recent backup he had was a manual quarterly backup from three months ago. Luckily, Payroll still had paper timesheets for the past month, so they were able to stick an intern on data entry and get people paid. So they just had a void for those two months in between the backup and the paper timesheets.
It wasn’t a huge issue, except for the fact that one of their employees was on parole. The parole officer asked the company to prove that the employee was working when he said he was. The officer wanted records for, you guessed it, the past three months. At that point, the company had to publicly admit to the fuckup. My dad was asked to resign… But at least the company started funding regular 3-2-1 backups (right before his two week notice was up.)
Except that one is automatically versioned and would have saved you this pain, and the other relies on you actively remembering to reflexively commit, and then do extra work to clean up your history before sharing, and once you push, it's harder to change history and make a clean version to share.
These days, there's little excuse to not use COW with automated snapshots in addition to your normal, manual, VCS activities.
I keep my git clone in Dropbox so I can revert accidental delete and always have the most recent code on all devices without having to remember to commit and push. If it requires manual execution I wouldn't really consider it a proper backup solution.
I have been burnt by Dropbox in the past so now use Syncthing between my desktop, laptop, and a private remote server with file versioning turned on. Trivial to global ignore node_modules, and not giving data to a third party.
I use Dropbox too. Though I have to admit, when running code you sometimes have to pause sync otherwise it interferes with code execution. But definitely worth the peace of mind. Sometimes you don't want to commit stuff until you're sure that it works.
On the contrary! I found out that a rewrite from scratch leads to much better code and abstractions, as you understand the problem space better. (On the other hand, beware of http://catb.org/jargon/html/S/second-system-effect.html)