A friend of mine did a "rm -rf ~ /tmp" rather than "rm -rf ~/tmp" on a fast SCSI local disk on his Sun workstation.
His backup strategy of tarring up everything into ~/backup went with that one too. I lectured his ass on that one.
However...
The same guy, no less than 8 years later carried around a DVD-RAM with his single copy of his life's work on it (I assume this was only 8 years of his life) and jammed it in one of those dodgy Pioneer slot loader drives and proceeded to mount it.
bzzzt ... wheee ... clunk ... BANG! DVD span to full speed and promptly shattered taking the drive fascia off and spraying everyone with bits of "I told you so".
He now puts up scaffolding which worries me even more...
Luckily I was on an IT maintained machine that takes nightly snapshots of home partitions so I was safe in the worst case. Had I done that on one of my personal machines I wouldn't have been so lucky.
