[cdavid]

In the same spirit, I once removed a chroot tree, forgetting I bind mounted /etc into it.

It took me half a day to recover from that.

Another one, even more stupid, is to recover a "backup" of /var, done without the proper rights to it. I noticed the problem after a lot of weirds errors cropping in. This one I did not recover - after a few hours, I ended up deciding that reinstalling linux on my machine would be faster and more reliable.

[nitrogen]

I've found it's useful to look through the man pages of commonly-used tools for an option to prevent traversing filesystems.