Went down to Florida with my girlfriend as she had job interviews last week. I used desktop commander while leaving my PC on at home while I was gone. Nothing was set to YOLO mode. DesktopCommander’s allowed dir was exclusively a folder on my desktop. I would use chatgpt classic via desktopcommander remotely or Codex to be able to code while not home and continue working on projects.
I was about to board the flight to return home when it responded with “That folder is empty, is there somewhere else you would like to look?”.
I figured, eh just a bug I’m sure everything is there. Got home five hours later to find that everything was indeed, gone. As soon as I tried to login, I BSOD’ed. Upon restart, my four screens all had a black background and I had lost 1.5TB of tax returns/docs, photos from old phones I didn’t have backed up elsewhere and TONS of other irreplaceable documents.
I post here not a complaint, but a warning, so you don’t have to go through all the same pain I did. Stayed up till four am just to discover none of it was recoverable, recovered to another drive to discover 95% of the perm deleted docs had been overwritten to some percentage which rendered most of my 30+million lines of code I’ve spent loads of time and probably tens of thousands of dollars to build, absolutely gone, nulled (filled with 0’s) and unrecoverable.
I had no settings allowed or enabled that could’ve allowed this. It truly just did its own thing, said hold my tokens, and obliterated every available byte on my system.
TLDR: Back your stuff up. Whatever computer you let these work on, make it so that if it was to delete or exfiltrate that whole drive, that you would still be okay and not completely done for, like myself. I really hope I help even one other person avoid this.