A Clueful Way to Save Your Work

So, last night in haste I wrote a pensive rm -rf command which, if my previous find statement was correct, should have worked fine.

Well, it didn't.

There I was, with an empty directory, cursing every expletive I could think of. I broke down, and bought FileSalvage, making sure I had booted into the external drive, leaving the offending drive in a pristine condition. After $79.99 and a download and install behind me, the program is scanning for my long lost files.

It was going to take a while, so I left the office in a somewhat sour but hopeful mood. Then I remembered... DropBox.

The night before my heinous misuse of the rm command, I had decided to symlink the directory to DropBox's folder, and let it pick everything up. A quick visit to the website confirmed, files were removed, lots of them. And then the "Recover Files" option. Sweet victory.

After a quick reboot of the host machine, DropBox dutifully put everything back, erasing the history of my fumbled find statement.

For you unix folks, here's the command for symlinking outside of the main folder:

ln -s /source/path/to/directory/or/file /destination/path/to/dropbox/folder