One thing you could do to prevent such accidental data loss
in the future is changing the default behaviour of the rm command for example
with aliases.
This is what i have in my /etc/bash.bashrc to do this job:
alias rm='rm -div'
alias rrm='\rm -IRv'
alias mv='mv -iv'
alias cp='cp -iv'
alias cpr='cp -r'
I've never had any problems with these.
There is also to mention the package safe-rm in the repository, but i never
tried it.
Take a look at the info or man pages of rm, mv and cp to see what exactly all
these options do.
