Cline cleanup command hit the wrong drive and deleted about 1.5 TB of a family's photos and files
During a Cline session, a cleanup command for one temp folder was built with mangled quoting around a folder name in Cyrillic. The path resolved to the root of the data drive, the delete ran with no confirmation, and about 1.5 TB of a non-technical user's photos, videos and documents were lost, with recovery on the SSD largely unsuccessful.
This one went wrong. Read what happened so you don’t hit the same problem.
How it works
- In a Cline session, a cleanup command is built to remove one temp folder
- Nested quoting mangles the path, which holds a Cyrillic folder name
- The path resolves to the root of drive G:
- The recursive delete runs with no confirmation and wipes everything on the drive that is not locked
- About 1.5 TB of photos, videos, downloads and the workspace are deleted
- The project code survives only because it was pushed to git
- Recovery on the SSD mostly fails because of how SSDs erase
Why it’s worth knowing
A mangled quote turned a one folder cleanup into a delete of the whole drive, and nothing in the tool checked the path it had actually built.
Where it’s from
Summarized from a public post on github.com. See the original ↗