Just now I wanted to open my folder with GOG installers on my harddrive, but accidentally hit the Delete button instead of the Enter button to open the selected folder. Immediately afterwards I clicked Enter after all, but right at that moment my computer had put up the question "the contents of this folder is too big for the recycle bin, do you want to permanently delete it?"

Thus my Enter was registered by Windows as "Yes I want to permanently delete the folder GOG - Good Old Games'. Poof, 194GB of game downloads gone and it wasn't to be found in the recycle bin either. Luckily I have a backup HDD and right now I'm putting back all of those 194GB's.

That, my dear GOGlodytes, is why you always should have a backup of your game installers. You never know what might happen.

I always have at least two backup drives for same reason. Another tip - increase the size of the Recycle Bin on your drives to as large as possible. That way accidentally deleting such a large folder in future will simply put it there instead of throwing up that "permanently delete?" prompt, at which point it's easy to restore.

Ouch. I know there are free recovery tools that can retrieve most if not all anything that was recently "deleted". As long as you haven't copied over those sectors with something else. But yes, "fat fingering" has led to some folders being dragged elsewhere and finding them is a major pain.

I'm a POWER USER! I always SHIFT+DELETE.

This has resulted in me deleting 100's of GB of data I didn't mean to. A similar downloads deletion experience to the OP being one of them.

I still do it though. Can't help myself. It's the curse of a power user.

I deleted a manuscript once, not that long ago... :-(

Yeah, I hope it was more of a text written for the joy or urge to write than something that everyone should read. I have not dared ask the author.

Set read-only attribute to folder.
Also in GNU/Linux it is possible to apply an immutable attribute, which will make it impossible to edit, move, rename or delete files. I don't know if there is an equivalent for this in Windows.

^ ^ ^
Good idea with a normal read only attribute.

I don't always accidentally delete my hard drives.

But when I do, it's physically.

I had a backup of my favorites several years ago. Then I quit. Gog ain't going anywhere.

There is no way I could accidentally erase my HD because to do that I'd need to get into the casing, and in order to get to the screws holding the casing on I'd need to move that giant electromagnet I have sitting there.

man that sucks, i bet you yelled at the monitor for a bit... i know i would have. i need to back up my backup, something mobile and all in one.... all those fires in california got me thinking what i would wish to grab if given 15min and other than my pets, husband, important papers (in that order lol) i would want to grab my games and seeing as how i cant grab my big box collection a gog library will have to do. wierd, i know

That has only to do with you not paying attention. I also delete the same way and it never happened to me.

FTFY,

our arrogance destroys us.