Deleting? once bitten, twice shy

[archie]

Rather than deleting ... and this applies whether deleting users, folders, or even files, consider disabling or renaming instead ... and then, if all is well for a while, go ahead and do the final deed. It's a matter of time before you get bitten if you don't heed to this advise. Yet, it may happen to all of us at one time or another and the consequences do vary.
Yes, Halloween is over, but do you have any deleting stories to tell?

[Jenni]

I gave my brother-in-law a computer. He knew nothing about computers, and other than basics, I did nothing to fill him in. He has, so far, deleted enough stuff as to render Windows unbootable three times. But the last time was months ago, hopefully he has learned his lesson.

My brother has his recycle bin set to delete automatically, drag into it and it's gone. I could never have that setup. All I would do is make new shortcuts all the time, lol. I look on my start menu for stuff too, and find it in other folders, lol. Kids!

[Demosthenes]

Well, anyone who uses Unix knows, "no news is good news". Unix will do anything without saying a word, which really unnerves some Windows users who need to press the "OK" button three times just to delete a single file.

"Are you sure?" Yes. "This is a program and will not run if deleted." No duh. "It is write protected, are you certain?" No, my finger must have slipped on the delete key and then moved the mouse over the OK button and I must have clicked when I sneezed that first time, and so on. Sometimes after a long night, I need my computer to do what I want without talking to me and making me change my mind.

I have not deleted anything important by accident. A few things that I thought were somewhere else. One or two times I removed files and then immediately thought, "Why did I do that?". For example, I downloaded this huge file of the network and let it sit all night. Then in the morning, I just deleted it thinking it was taking up space. I am not much of a morning person.

Respectfully,

Demosthenes

[mairving]

Oh yeah, Demosthenes, 'Nix is not very forgiving when it comes to deletion. Once it is gone, it is gone. I develop websites. I run Apache on my Linux box with all the sites in /home/websites . Well I thought that I would clean up some of the files and delete some of the directories that weren't used. What I meant to type was rm -R directoryname. What I typed for some unknown reason was rm -R *. Ouch, that deleted all of the directories in /home/websites/. I was thinking to myself, why and where is that recycle bin. Most of the sites, I could pull the data from my hosting company. But I still lost some .psd templates, that were a pain to create.