whole desktop erased

[VisoXC]

when i used the -debugdir flag and chose my desktop as the destination it just deleted my whole desktop. sadly all my code and a lot of other stuff was on there, which is all gone now. is there any way to recover this data?

[lu4p]

Sorry that happened to you.

You can use Windows file recovery, assuming you're on windows.

I agree that this behavior of deleting all files in the debugdir directory may be surprising to users/ lead to unintentional data loss.

Some approaches on how to make it less likely that users unintentionally delete important files:

I would assume that most users are at least 4 folders deep when running -debugdir:

/home/user/repo/debug
/home/user/projects/repo/debug

So maybe we can warn about uses which are less than 4 folders deep and add a --deletemydata option to override it.

Or calculate the size of the directory which will be used and if it's of x amount of storage exit with a warning. (Calculating this may take a long time for directories which we shouldn't deletes maybe it can also be if it takes more than - x time to calculate we abort.

Alternatively we could also check if the directory is either empty or containing a directory structure which looks like the output of -debugdir and warn otherwise.

Or we could do a combination of them.

[pagran]

@lu4p Looks better to me to just create a subfolder and delete the subfolder. For example -debugdir /opt means garble manipulates /opt/garble_src, this will break backwards compatibility but guarantees safety.

[lu4p]

@pagran what about subsequent runs

[mvdan]

I think we can leave a sentinel empty file, such as .garble-debugdir, and refuse to recursively delete a non-empty directory unless that file exists. That should prevent mistakes where we delete lots of unrelated files.