[haertig]

Thank the Lord for good backups!

Today, my fingers refused to move as intended when using the mouse. I was viewing photographs on my computer, an activity that would normally be totally harmless to my Calibre library. However, when trying to click on a photo directory to open it, somehow I managed to drag-n-drop an adjacent Calibre directory and accidentally started some unknown and unplanned for copy/move/delete file operation (???) I could see a massive number of my Calibre files scrolling by under some operation that I don't know what it was (Was it drag-n-drop? Right button double-click? Who knows what I did!) This apparently queued up a zillion file operations, so I couldn't just cancel one thing - I tried that and then the next operation in queue started up. I quickly killed all my Linux user processes to try and mitigate the damage (it was too late - after only a few seconds you are already screwed).

Oh heck, this was going to be one gigantic mess!

I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but ultimately there were no ill effects to my Calibre library of thousands of books - because I had good backups (saved to remote servers). A simple restore-from-backup of all my Calibre directories and libraries fixed everything. I have automated nightly snapshot backups to multiple remote servers, with 365 daily snapshots saved, so I lost absolutely nothing.

So if anybody here is NOT currently doing backups, please start doing them. I am not a computer novice - I've been a system administrator and application programmer for decades. Even someone super familiar with computers can sneeze when using the mouse and royally hose things up. This is one of the reasons I don't like GUI's all that much. Yes, they are helpful and convenient - but sometimes TOO convenient when you do something by accident.

Backup your files everyone! It saved me today. It could save you tomorrow.