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Use the package manager your OS ships with and stay away from customized install scripts from various 3rd parties. This is not the first time this has happened, most famous one was probably that Steam bug some years ago that deleted everything for people.

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OS packagers have bugs like this every so often, because they still run custom upgrade scripts behind the scenes. Pretty sure I remember one in Debian a few years back (sorry, name escapes), and it was not the first time I remember seeing that.

I might just have been lucky then as that has never happened to me in almost +30 years of using various distributions like Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, CentOS, Redhat and more. Literally not a single time this has happened to me on either desktop nor server. But as I said, I might just have been lucky. Looks like I will increase my backup frequency now.

The first time I installed Linux was around 2007. I use it as my main OS since 2010.

I have only lost data due to hard drive failure, or at my own request (i.e formatting over what I thought I had backed up).

I recently enabled TRIM on my full-disk-encrypted SSD system. No sign of data loss yet.

I have always used ext3/ext4.

HN link on the Steam bug: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8896186

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