Give warning on deletion of large amount of data

[2br-2b]

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Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

So... I may or may not have seen my life flash before my eyes when I almost deleted my entire file server.

I was planning on emptying the trash, so I opened Nextcloud Files, clicked the trash can, clicked the checkmark to select all of the files, then went to the three dots and clicked the trash icon.

Little did I realize that I hadn't actually clicked the trash icon. I just deleted every file from my Nextcloud root directory.

Fortunately, I'm able to restore these items from the trash, but I'm now having to let this sit the night and hope that none of my shares are broken by deleting then restoring these folders. In addition, I'll have to restore all the folders tomorrow, leading to more personal downtime.

While this is a problem with me and not with Nextcloud, it would be nice if there were a warning if you either delete all of your files or if you delete files >30 or so Gb. Just a "Warning: you are about to delete XX Gb of files. Are you sure you want to continue?" to help people like me :-)

Describe the solution you'd like

It would be nice if there were a warning if you either delete all of your files or if you delete files >30 or so Gb. Just a "Warning: you are about to delete XX Gb of files. Are you sure you want to continue?" to help people like me :-)

Even Ubuntu requires an extra flag before running rm -rf /, so some extra confirmation would be nice!

This could get annoying for some users, but I think the tradeoff is worth it. Even if it's not based on file size and is just there to make sure you don't delete your root directory, anything would be helpful!

Describe alternatives you've considered

Double-checking my file directories!

Additional context
Sigh just giving it the night to finish the deletion, then will spend all day tomorrow restoring the files 😔
All in all though, thank you guys for maintaining Nextcloud!

[joshtrichards]

Hi @2br-2b - I hope the restore process is progressing! I'm sorry to hear that happened.

That's a good shout-out to the default rm -rf / behavior (at least in the GNU edition). I hadn't realized the behavior of rm had changed (for / at least)! I still think of typos leading to an inadvertentrm -rf / as 100% destructive by default (because that's how it used to be).

Anyhow, thanks for sharing your experience (unfortunate as it may be) and suggestion. And I hope things work out for you and your data!

Ref: "Treating / specially" -
https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/Treating-_002f-specially.html

[joshtrichards]

Fixed in #43231

[quentinDupont]

@joshtrichards does this works if I deleted datas of my computer synced ? or just on web client ?