Re: Help! Accidentally started deleting /usr
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier [jbrockmeier@earthlink.net] wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> > By the way, is there any way of setting up an "undelete" for averting this
> > kind of disaster? My Dad mentioned that Novell Netware has an undelete
> > which basically puts off really deleting stuff for about 5 days --- unless
> > it has to because of lack of space. This sounds like a _very_ useful
> > feature.
>
> Good lord, please NO. Having an "undelete," IMHO, leads to very
> sloppy practices - better to learn to make backups of important
> data - and to use the root account with care.
That kind of argument is like saying you shouldn't bring life-jackets
when you go sailing, because that encourages bad sailing practices!
Of course it's good to be careful (and generally I am), but
occasionally everyone slips up and if a feature could be added which
would save the day under that kind of circumstance ___and___ if it
doesn't cause any problems or inefficiencies itself, then why not add
it??
You are right that it's good not to be sloppy. Even when you're not
root it's good not to be sloppy. If we __really__ wanted to encourage
users not to be sloppy we would make people run as root all the time
(much like MS Windows)! Because then people would know that any
mistake would have serious consequences which would be good motivation
to be less sloppy. The point is, that sloppiness is related to risk
factor. The more risk, the more care you need to take. By itself, I
don't think it is a good argument to say we should not reduce the risk
because people may take less care. If the risk is lowered, less care
is needed! The only way I can see your argument might work is as
follows. An undelete function would not work in the case of a nearly
full drive. If people became sloppy, relying on the ability to
undelete, they could be burned when the drive becomes nearly full.
But I don't see this as really being any worse a danger than the
current situation. And besides, as well as adding an undelete
feature, it would be possible, when the disk gets near to full, to
have rm warn not to rely on undelete and ask for a confirmation of
delete.
As for backups --- yes they're a good idea, but my practice is to only
backup /home stuff and /etc stuff. If I lose the rest, it can always
be recovered with a reinstall. Having an undelete feature would
reduce the number of cases where a reinstall was necessary.
> Basically, proposing an "undelete" feature is trying to automate
> against stupidity - and that's a never-ending battle, trying to
> protect the system from the worst-case scenario user.
It's not just stupidity, we all slip occasionally. I had been working
on the computer all day and my brain was a bit tired when it made me
mistakenly type "usr" when I meant to type "tmp".
Of course there are limits to how many safeguards we should provide,
but this would be a "cost-effective" one.
> There were some good suggestions, though - make an alias from
> rm to 'rm -i' so that you always get prompted against making
> massive mistakes.
I have done that in the past. But it is a pain to work with ---
having to confirm everything! Sometimes with this set, you get into
the habit of confirming everything automatically so it may not always
help. An undelete function would be much less of a pain to work with,
and would do a better job.
> I've accidentally deleted a few projects in my own home directory -
> but I make backups at least once a week and burn them to CD. Even in
> the event of a catastrophic failure of my hard drive, I only need to
> buy a new drive and copy my home directory over.
I don't have the luxury of a CD burner. I backup to the hard drive of
another machine. I don't have room to do a full backup, but a backup
of the important bits should be enough to recover --- just that it
might take a little longer. An undelete feature would mean a
reduction in the number of circumstances where this "longer
restoration effort" was required.
Cheers,
Mark.
--
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"They told me I was gullible ... and I believed them!"
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