Rclone deleted my home folder. All photos, videos, documents gone

What is the problem you are having with rclone?

I've just lost all of my most important files from my computer. Not in trash, not anywhere else.

What is your rclone version (output from rclone version)

1.51

Which OS you are using and how many bits (eg Windows 7, 64 bit)

Linux 64 bit

Which cloud storage system are you using? (eg Google Drive)

Google Drive

rclone sync GoogleDrive:documents .

Yes, I tried to sync a Google Drive folder locally, and assumed the above command would save the folder to my home folder, rather than replace the entire content. Really, you think it's a good idea to run destructive operations without warning?

As they say, with great power comes great responsibility.

It's always best to use --dry-run before you perform anything destructive.

There are both sides to that coin as if you put in a flag, majority of folks would just turn it off as many run automated syncs as well.

Feel free to add some comments to the issue:

It looks like the command you ran would have made GoogleDrive:documents sync to whatever local dir you were in and delete anything in that dir from what I can tell. Did something else occur?

Yes that is exactly what happened and this is purely bad software design. The default should be a warning message that can be turned off using the config. It's incredible that you expect users to know flags for dry-running commands.

I feel bad for your situation and losing data is not good.

It's also documented right on the page as well to use dry-run as it's destructive.

Feel free to add your comments to the issue as if it's something that more people think is a good idea, I'm sure it would get implemented.

Please keep the comments civil as well.

No I think I'm just going to delete rclone and find something else.

I understand why you're angry, and I'm sorry for your losses, but this isn't the fault of the developer, this is you misunderstanding what the term "synchronize" means, not reading the documentation, and not having adequate backups.

I agree that perhaps there should be more warnings involved when doing a potentially destructive action, but this is like blaming the developer of rm when you run rm -rf /. There is only so much handholding a developer can do, and sync is working as intended here.

Anyway, if you're looking to recover your local data, it should be possible with testdisk, as thankfully you didn't try to sync the other way around and nuke GDrive. Rclone does an OS-level delete for local files, so they should be recoverable as long as you haven't overwritten that part of the disk, albeit with possibly broken filenames. I'm happy to try and give you a hand with recovery if you like, since I know how much losing data sucks.

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.