how I ENTIRELY screwed myself over in the span of one evening

or, The Tragedy of my Documents Folder (and Subsequently All of my FLPs)

now, i, like many people, use the documents folder on their computer to store important files. sometimes it's just images i wanna reference or hold onto, sometimes it's data for application. regardless, some of those files i had in there were irreplaceable.

i, like some mac users, also run parallels in order to access windows programs when needed.

i, like some people, play the persona games.

i, like some people, have a modded switch.

i, like--

okay, i'm not going to write like this anymore, the bit's overstayed its welcome! XP

annyways, last tuesday, july 30th, i decided to finally play persona 5 after it sitting on my switch for WELL over a year at this point.

great game, i was HOOKED. i decided to check the gamebanana page for the switch version to see if there were any good quality of life mods like there are for persona 4 golden. i found 2 that i thought were neat and went to install them.

after grabbing a rom for p5r and setting ryujinx back up to dump a copy of the game  to mod (i didn't have enough space on my switch's SD card), i fired up aemulus in order to unpack the files and it kept throwing errors back at me. i tried poking around with CRI File Tools and that also failed, so i decided to dump it again.

unfortunately for me, i had run into a fatal flaw: storage space. in the year and a half i've had this macbook, my 1tb ssd has gotten quite full less than 10 gigs after dumping p5r. this just made doing things a massive hassle. so, my solution, as anyone would do in this situation, i went to go free up space. after doing minimal research, i realized my install for parallels took up over 200 gigs of space-- space that i knew DAMN well i wasn't using otherwise.

this is where the issue begins.

i downsize it, but i can't get it much smaller than 185 gigs. but i can go smaller, i thought, and i start actually erasint files i don't need! i gutted the downloads folder! but i didn't stop there no:

this next part requires more explanation:

parallels has a feature that allows you to access macos folders from within windows. i have this enabled because it makes it so much more convenient to, well, access the files. i had it set up so that my downloads and document folders were shared.

(in hindsight-- why the HELL was my documents folder enabled within parallels?? i did NOT use it there!!)

the file explorer in parallels was already being incredibly screwy that day, which i probably should've taken as a sign to reboot or something, but i guess i didn't think it was being bad enough to warrant.

parallels usually makes it very clear which folders are native to windows and which ones it's pulling from macos, and it does this by giving the macos folders the same blue icons they have on macos itself. so you'd think there's a visual que that immediately tells me "this is the folder from my mac!" and normally, you'd be right.

however, if you refer two sections of text above, the file explorer was not working properly. and unfortunately for me, hthe folders i had pinned to the sidebar showed up as a regular folder.

so me, assuming the documents folder is the one from parallels, decides to gut that one as well and-- oh wow it found so much data! this is perfect!

oh. that's going to take a while to delete.
so i waited and waited, after around 20 minutes, i decided i wanted to use the computer again and tabbed out. prolly playing rocket league or something, i don't remember and it's not important.

i think what gets me the most is that this could have been avoided if i had looked at the screen for more than 15 seconds within that, like, hour and a half window. you'd think that being given that much time i would've checked and went "oh shit wait those are files i need!" while it took its sweet time deleting them. but alas, if that had happened, we wouldn't be here today. if that had happened, this blogpost would have been nothing more than a "whoops i almost fucked up real bad! :P" message in a couple of discord servers amongst my friends. but due to my own idiocy, i'm out roughly 65 gigs worth of files that i didn't particularly plan on getting rid of any time soon.