I recently decided to replace the SD card in my Raspberry Pi and reinstall the system. Without any special backups in place, I turned to rsync to duplicate /var/lib/docker with all my containers, including Nextcloud.
Step #1: I mounted an external hard drive to /mnt/temp.
Step #2: I used rsync to copy the data to /mnt/tmp. See the difference?
Step #3: I reformatted the SD card.
Step #4: I realized my mistake.
Moral: no one is immune to their own stupidity 😂
I know I’m going to get down voted for this but this would be almost impossible to fuck up with a gui. Yet people insist that writing commands manually is superior. I’m sorry for your loss.
Guardrails are absolutely not a reason why people prefer the CLI. We want the guardrails off so we can go faster.
This is on me for sure that I’ve never seen anyone be faster using a CLI compared to a GUI especially for basic operations which is what most of us do 95% of the time. I know there are specific cases where a command just does it better/easier but for me that’s not the case for everyday stuff.
There is something to be said about CLI applications being risky by default (“rm” doesn’t prompt to ask,
rsync --deletewill do just that). But I’ve definitely slipped on the mouse button while “drag & dropping” files in a GUI before. And it can be a right mess if you move a bunch of individual files rather than a sub-folder…At least for windows, you can ctrl-z that away and it’ll handle your mouse fumble. Explorer also highlights the files after a copy so if that doesn’t work (and it was a copy action), just delete them immediately.
I haven’t used *nix for daily stuff in years but I’m sure the same abilities are there, surely.