I deleted about 6,000 personal photos—at a time in my life when I was trying to be a more serious photographer—once in a similar move a little more than 15 years ago. I didn’t cry or break down. I amortized it over the rest of my life so I’m just a little bit sadder every day than I otherwise would have been. :P It was just “power use” of Unix that time. Perl was not in on the conspiracy for me to be stupid. I got a LOT more serious about never using a root account and ensuring regular old permissions for myself and doing things like–

moo@cow[552]~>alias | ack 'cp|mv|rm'
cp    cp -i
mv    mv -i
rm    rm -i
[download]

Oh! Say, I did actually hose several thousand Amazon.com customers with Perl. Haven’t thought about that in many years. The clue rests in the single most scrub hacker mistake I ever made: s/>>/>/;

The good news there is I spent approximately 30 hours with nearly no sleep after that learning to query the Oracle DB directly to forensically recover from context a good amount of what was lost.