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.
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.
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.
But what about the movies where the actors are typing commands and a visual GUI is moving around and updating on the screen (and making sound effects too).
Isn’t that the best of all worlds? /s
Fair enough.
CLI is not about ease to begin with, it is about versatility.
To play devil’s advocate, tab completion would have also likely caught this. OP could have typed /mnt/t<Tab> and it would autofill temp, or <Tab><Tab> would show the matching options if it’s ambiguous.