Turns out that 'rm bla *' isn't the same as 'rm bla*'.
Furthermore, it turns out that executing an rm * in your working directory that contains all of your thesis code input decks is "bad."
Yeah so I just nuked all of my input parameters. It was high-adrenaline there for a minute. I found a recent copy of an input deck in an email and was able to re-construct the missing lines from memory.
Oh, and I just backed up the 151GB of data I have.
Now the supercomputer folks here back my stuff up for me, but I don't have access to those backups at 8:00pm on a Sunday holiday. And I have a dry run for my defense tomorrow morning, so I have to get the last of the data done tonight. Luckily, the data itself was somewhere else. I just lost an hour reconstructing this input deck.
During times of high potential fuckfactor, you may want to consider using a cronjorb to back everything up.
Make a script that contains this line:
tar -cvzf /backup/borkborkbackup_`date +"%Y%m%d"`.tgz ~me/my_precious_precious_shazzle
And then crontab -e:
0 0 * * 0 ~me/that_awesome_script.sh
That'll make a backup nightly. Clearly, this doesn't work too well if you don't have access to your very own crontab.
I'm sure someone can come up with something better, too. This is a UNIX system; I don't know those very well.
Yeah, no access to the crontab on the supers. Like I said, they do daily backups for me. It was just an issue of access timing to those backups that screwed me tonight.