Never run mv or rm without backup

NEVER USE mv OR rm WITHOUT BACKUP. I REPEAT, NEVER.

I was porting the old snippets that I wrote over the last few months to finally put them in this wiki today.
The old snippets used to be in the format snippet_$(date +%s).md, so each snippet had a unique name even when created on the same day. I wanted to quickly mv all these snippets to a new folder with the format YYYY-MM-DD-snippet.md for each file.
My little brain forgot that the only reason I had the +%s option in the first place was to remove the possibility of overrides when snippets are created on the same day. The command overwrote four of my previous snippets, and now I think they are forever gone.
I don’t even remember what those snippets could have been. That feels like such a loss of data.

Lessons Learned

• Don’t use mv or rm without thinking about the consequences.
  • But I know my stupid brain will do this again.
• Set the following alias in your environment that shows a warning and asks for input before overriding a file.
  • alias mv="mv -i"
• Since I was already in a git repo, I could’ve just committed all the files first. GIT SOLELY EXISTS TO RECOVER FROM THE MISTAKES OF IDIOT DEVELOPERS LIKE ME; I SHOULD HAVE JUST COMMITTED WHAT I HAD BEFORE RUNNING THE COMMAND.
• I already printed the operation before executing to make sure my little bash script works. I should’ve just looked at the output before running the actual command.
• I could’ve just used cp to make new files in a directory instead of using mv. I could’ve then removed the old files after confirming everything was good.

Man, this just felt like the information loss of the century to me.
I don’t know what precious ideas those snippets contained. Maybe you can say they were useless; otherwise, I would’ve remembered. Maybe they were the next big thing that the universe required. We will never know.
Sigh, let’s stop being emotional.

PS: I used to call the wiki articles snippets before. So you will see me referring to them as snippets here.

One of the post would have been talking about my lvimrc config for editing C files on the server. Other post was talking about why I am grateful to my parents for raising me right.