|
Top-level
 @b0rk I tried saferm and I still think that should be the default everywhere... ... but I've more come to terms with the paranoia. Care is fundamentally necessary, being paranoid about it is *correct*. Most tools are well-behaved by default, but some are designed to let you shoot your foot if that's what you want. 10 comments
@b0rk it has saved my bacon once, and I managed to ctrl-c early enough on another machine's `sudo rm -rf ~` to not lose anything important. Hence: paranoia is healthy. It really should be the default. It's much too easy to accidentally do that in scripts with bad string handling, and the few legitimate uses are so rare and so special that "run /bin/real_rm` by hand" is entirely reasonable. @b0rk otherwise, my general tactic, and what I recommend to lots of people who want to learn computers: get a burner laptop for like $100. Learn how to wipe it and start over. Then go wild. If there's no valuable data on it, it doesn't really matter what you do with it. E.g. this is how I test backup software, because I don't want to hand my "real" data over until I think I can trust one. People need playgrounds. Their sole machine with their entire life's worth of data is not a playground.  @groxx did you use this playground approach yourself? did it help? what kinds of stuff did you do on your playground computer? @b0rk backups and restore testing is a very big one - lots of backup software is easy to set up but awful to recover with. By that point they've already hooked you, they have little incentive to do much but take your rent money until you have a problem, because nobody wipes their main PC to test it. I use it for new OS testing and sometimes trying things out for friends - resizing positions is a crapshoot much of the time, and a problematic install can hose the whole system, so yeah. Paranoia. @b0rk and as to using it myself to learn: yep! It was by far my biggest and easiest "ok now it makes sense" stepping stone, and I still use it as such. Plus, like, ever wondered what `sudo rm -rf /` actually does, how much it breaks, and how you can sometimes recover from it? I've done it a few times, it's interesting. |
Gregory's Server
@groxx cool, are you still using saferm?