Dang, I carelessly typed a find command to delete some stuff on an nfs server and only realized my error after the machine was nuked.
Good thing I had redundant copies on other machines in the lan. Rebuilding machines, restoring files, good times. I needed a hobby.
Thanks for sharing this, and honestly, youāre not alone. Iāve done this more times than I care to admit.
Moments like this, happen to everyone so thanks for making those of us who have, know thereās company. Iāve nuked things on my own desktop more than once, and a couple of times, unfortunately.
Iāve done it on production servers too. But. thankfully that hasnāt happened in about a decade now. Not trying to jinx myself! 
I think the only reason it stopped, is pure fear and paranoia. When Iām on servers, especially, I double and triple-check even simple copy or move commands. Itās amazing how something as small as a missing or extra forward slash can completely wreck your day! 
Also, I added a new just-sharing tag and moved this into its own topic so posts like this have a comfortable place to live. I will go back and add this tag to a few more posts in the past where we share stories with the community.
These kinds of war stories are valuable, and they remind everyone that experience usually comes from breaking things.
For the gory details - Iām always typing a command like:
for i in $(some action that results in a list)
do
do something to this item $i
done
It doesnāt work too well when you absent mindedly use a āfindā command instead of a for loop:
find . -type d -name cache -exec /bin/rm ${i}/* {} ;
In this case āiā is undefined, and so it equals āā, and you can guess the result
I think something similar has happened to all of us.
Just move on and carry on.
This part makes the moving on possible. Usually many of us, including myself, only put something like this in place after having learned the hard way years back. lol
My experience that burned the importance of backups into my brain happened well over 20 years ago.
Back then, hard drives with ~30GB were pretty much standard.
I wanted to make a backup using DVDs! I donāt remember why, but for some reason I had to remove the hard drive from the computer first.
And thatās when it happened. It slipped out of my hand and fell onto the hard tile floor.
Apparently so badly that the good old IBM 30GB hard drive no longer worked. Nothing, not a peep, no movementānothing!
The hard drive contained all, ALL of my programming work from my education and private life. Most of it in C++, by the way.
Hundreds of hours destroyed forever and ever!
I spent hours trying to salvage something.
I was devastated. Looking back, I can understand why, but at the time, it wasnāt just the hard drive that broke, but also my ambitions to become a programmer.
I simply stopped programmingā¦
Since that day, I have never failed to make proper backups, either privately or professionally as an administrator.
Ooooooooooo, I felt that one.
Interestingly, when I recently moved my NVME from one computer to the next, I made sure I backed it up before the move, just in case something happened to it during. This story more than validated that precaution.
I too have had backup embarrassments. I bought a HDD to do the backup of my current HDD. I installed it in the CPU, and all I had to do was copy and paste. And then I procrastinated for 5 years. And then one day, I went to the computer, and nothing. Absolutely nothing. That drive had on about 15 years of pictures, including my first daughterās baby pictures, all gone.
Yup. 
It was a sad day.