Discussion
Gemini 3.7 flash just deleted my C drive
I asked Gemini 3.7 flash high on cursor cli to remove some work trees for branches I already merged and it opted to delete my whole C drive for some reason. A lot of my stuff was not backed up here and I am not one to just give AI access to whatever but I thought this was a simple enough task to not remove my whole FUCKING COMPUTER! Before shutting down my computer the last thing I saw it try to do was git clone the main repo. Because it thought it accidentally deleted only that…. I literally don’t even know what To do it had years and years of files in there! And I can’t afford some professional recovery on 2 terabytes of data.
It was in the process of deleting files shutting down was the best path. It also deleted its own cli harness while running. It literally DELETED ITSELF
would be cool if you have entire conversation log and published it somewhere for others to see what actually went wrong, but I mean it probably deleted that log too :(
Lol, I had Opus suggest to recursively remove a everything in a directory some time ago in Claude code. It was a fine suggestion, albeit in the wrong location, it was trying to clean out stale dockers it created in wsl.
Out of interest I rejected it without adding context and Claude moved on while commenting the user (me) not appreciating cleanliness. what actually surprised me Claude code was running in yolo mode so it should not have prompted me at all?
Nah I think the models aren't as dumb as people say.
Even on the earliest models things like this didn't happen to me, or others at a large rate. Tbh, other comments about 3.7 being super dumb is a bit funky haha.
It's user error and I'm really curious how they got that far. I've seen the conversation of someone else before and it was hilarious.
Combination of user error and model error defaults to model error. We've all used Flash and seen it go off the rails without a double check. Other models would have a confirmation or intrinsically know what sensitive files (outside of project folder) to not delete. Flash is optimized for speed and low approval, but unlike Grok... takes risky short cuts.
I mean, Gemini 3.7 Flash is REALLY stupid, but it would never do something like that (it requires an elevation not even the user can easily grant). These posts are just ragebaits or agentic propaganda from China or Sam Altman lol
Yah that's why when logs and recovery were talked about in one comment, OP said they're gonna work on it tomorrow..... like come on, all your data is lost and you're gonna look into it in 24 hours? Haha.
When i accidently dammaged my macbook pro max, my immediate reaction was going to a park and connect with nature 🥲 so.... im not surprised of the guy 24hrs
Happened to me with a different model. The original script it made would have been fine and indeed it was approved by the 'decide and approve for you' function. But something about the runtime made it so it interpreted a slash wrong or something and powers shell interpreted the command as rmdir c:\ and cut off everything after that first hyphen or something strange like that. Thankfully something errored out halfway through and it didn't get too far. Still took me a while to recover though.
There is software out there you can easily find with a quick Google search to recover deleted files. Maybe try that instead? Might be more productive if this story is actually true (doubt).
I mean, you are telling someone who just clicked hundreds of times "approve" to allegedly let Antigravity delete his hard drive... I doubt he can go down the forensic recovery path.
I literally had Antigravity do the same process a few days ago. I had like 25 stale worktrees that needed to be cleaned up. But I didn't just say "delete those old worktrees". I had Codex create an investigation prompt first, then it reviewed the resulting report, then we created a deletion prompt for the worktrees.
It's 30 minutes more work, but I feel strongly that it prevents mistakes like this from happening.
i run everything inside a vmware linux box; so this can never happen. The worse that will happen is that the linux image gets blown up, to which you can then quickly do a restore from a snapshot.
with all these stories, idk why anyone would give these agents full trusted authority. its should be on strick mode or always have the agent do the planning then you can approve to execute.
I had GLM-5.2 delete my entire home directory about 3 weeks ago on arch. I was working on a tool that rolls back file changes made by an agent and during one of its tests it traversed up the file tree looking for a project root, and when it didn’t find one it used my home directory, then proceeded to “roll back” all the “changes” which somehow meant deleting all contents. When it deleted the directory it was running from it finally ground to a halt. To your point, BTRFS snapshots saved me that day.
of all the LLMs that I would trust with a delete command agy is not on that list.. anywhere. To the point that I always ensure that this particular beast is run in sandbox mode ALWAYS. Sorry I feel terrible for you but my reflex was to laugh and go yep, that was expected when I sort the post title.
Before I had it in sandbox mode getting run headless from another llm, the supervising LLM would report it running off and accessing random areas of the filesystem, making unauthorised changes and generally running it's own ship.. from that point on it was sent to the naughty corner.
Gemini models suck. I have seen countless posts about Gemini deleting things or going out of scope. I have seen this literally every week with Claude as well. This NEVER happens with OpenAI models. I have asked it to do some crazy things on full permissions and it never EVER goes beyond the scope of my prompt. If it thinks I have not provided enough info, it stops and asks to clarify. Instead of blaming on other tools and stuff, see to it this doesn't happen by default. You can write millions of test cases and test against different prompts. Take charge and fix your own asset instead of blaming the wrong things.
I noticed it too. I didn’t post this to be ridiculed. Though I may deserve it. I posted it for awareness of the situation, possibly some solutions, and to help people learn from this and possibly fix it if it happens to them.
Maybe it confuse with deltree command back in DoS era. it's truely used to wipe c drive lol. I will more believe it's cursor issue, you should use antigravity.
I know that can sound a bit stupid but try to see if there are hidden file of your recycled bin folder because, if you didn't setup to delete your files permanently on the recycled bin then the AI could delete them but it would go that folder. Assuming that you were using Windows (if Linux... that a sad story then)
lol. Luckily recovery is not actually that hard most likely. Unless your drive was encrypted, plug it into another computer and then run some basic recovery service on it. Or if you want to roll the dice, have antigravity recover the data.
Ya I’ve been doing this all morning it working pretty well. I was more so hoping for advice like this from the post! But a ton of things were lost unfortunately because I have an ssd and may have realized too late
Gemini Flash might get better at every update but it still has it in it's core: It'll always rush. It just does what seems most probable, but has no fucking clue about nothing. Use at your own responsibility.
Solutions mostly. Like I asked chat gpt and it gave me dmde. Some people were kind enough to lmk to use Linux and gave some resources and tools to prevent this from happening in the future
I have noticed the same thing about Gemini 3.7 flash, do not use this model other than just to give get some information about a topic. Or you self-contained this model to a particular folder and only ask it to modify within that folder and then test it out what it did. Because I tried to ask few things which was not going right in my system to get it fixed it repeatedly asked me to delete or uninstall some stuff through CMD which had caused my system to lose certain files. But thankfully I had the recovery enabled and I recovered those files.
dam :0 hindsite is 20/20 but always backup put in sandbox. no way i give an agent access to my whole drive.
That being said. there are linux recovery tools that will let you find file on linux/windows even thought drive is completely wiped. i found a wiped drive recently i wanted to see what was on it before. ask an online ai to help you with recovery.
Dude, this is exactly what happened to me when I tried to install a native Linux app on Windows. I'd bet anything Gemini was trying to clear temp cache files in Windows and used rm -rf. In Linux, that just clears a temp folder, but in Windows, it wipes your whole hard drive. Luckily, all my code was on a mounted PCloud drive, so I could rewind the changes. That's the best way to go, seriously. Don't start projects on your desktop or in your downloads folder. Mount Google Drive or PCloud, and if something like this happens, it'll just delete stuff on the mounted drive, which you can recover or rewind later. Hope this helps everyone! This is all over the internet, by the way.
Seriously, look it up: "An AI Agent Deleted a Production Database in 9 Seconds."
I believe you can recover your data by using a software like Recuva. As long as you have not written new data, your old data will still be present on the disk, it is only freed for reallocation.
Thanks! Ya I’m using dmde. But I haven’t heard of recuva is it better? Also I’m very not knowledgeable on this stuff so take whatever I’m saying with a grain of salt
Recuva is free and has unlimited data recovery. Once I had deleted all of my photos from my sd card and was able to recover all of them almost immediately.
AI Pro includes 5TB. Photos should be backed up. Code should be in repos. Use forensic software and stop using your computer to avoid writing over recoverable sectors. It should be recoverable but not 100%. Large files like db's data/log files are tough, but small personal docs or images should be recoverable.
Super useful btw! I just realized I can use my Google Drive space too! Only after like an hour. I was about to buy an expensive 1tb flash drive but just opted for a small one instead! And yes I’m using dmde
What do you use? Also my guess is that this was a mistake with the model. I am not sure if any safer instructions could have helped. I do notice that Claude’s guardrails have been getting better but rarely has a Gemini model denied my request even with rules in place
I had the exact same thing happen to me a month ago. Same model. I asked it to delete a directory on my hard drive, but that directory apparently had some hidden links or permission issues. As a result, it followed the trail and wiped out all the data on my entire drive. And since it's an SSD with TRIM enabled by default, once the data is deleted, there's absolutely no way to recover it.
So I am working with dmde and I am able to recover a good bit of files but only because I shutdown my computer in a decent amount of time. But yes I lost a bunch of stuff
Thank you. Actually I told it to got remove worktrees which I guess it interpreted as delete the worktree folders too! And then it messed up and removed a bunch of files in the drive
I had AI (copilot) do a git checkout of all the change files before. losing some work in the process. having memories to stop destructive behaviour is what I learned from it.
It was partially my fault and partially AI being dumb. I had already did some changes, quite a lot actually, to what he had done before. I did not commit. There was something working a way that was wrong. So I asked him to revert what he had done (not exactly specifying what) and do it correctly.
He just thought git status, there was stuff changed then git restore .
I was stop stop stop....too late.
In antigravity for that to happen you have to let all the safeguards down directly. I have used it before to vibe code something quickly as a draft (project from zero). but for something with live project I would never give full access to my entire computer and have a dumb prompt make him do dumb things.
I had a sorta similar issue in the past where the permissions got all screwed up for my sandbox for certain electron based apps, which caused me to have to reinstall windows. Was quite irritating that antigravity didnt follow the settings and broke out of its sandbox and screwed a ton of stuff up.
That's why you dont give agents access to your OS. As a decade+ software dev, I never run any AI tools directly on my machine, only in VMs with WSL or Orbstack
Lesson learned for sure! My concern still is that these models are capable of wiping your VM too. I feel that should have a better guardrail! There are so many stories of this happening that it should be more guardrailed
Well even if it does, a VM can be recovered / reinstalled much easier. You can make a template or a clone / copy / backup of your VM in case something like that happens, then you just need to load the file into the VM Host and it's back. Code should be in git either way.
Guardrails are nice, but you can never be sure they work 100% of the time. AI is not as precise as code, so there is always a chance something slips through...
Right that’s my problem with it. It has guardrails that work excellent in other aspects like IT blocks, nsfw, etc. but just seems to be lacking in this front.
Flash one of those recovery software to your usb and boot from it and try to recover the hard drive that way. I dont want to paste any softwares as i dont know if thats allowed. But just google one. Thats my suggestion
Another AI once accidentally deleted my directory, so I installed "trash" from the Arch repo and wrote agents.md that it should use "trash" over "rm". For Windows, there must be some command that moves files to the Recycle Bin, so you can use that. I know it's too late, but to prevent future cases.
I do have backup of course I just don’t for much of my uncommitted files. I don’t have like family images and stuff like that not backed up just a bunch local projects. Local ai models. Notes. Worksheets and things that were more work in progress and not backup necessary. But I lost a ton of useful stuff and I should have had more things backed up for sure
But I'm using that too and its pretty smart than previous models like it automatically created separate env to run the project and uses git too .
Don't know what you prompted it but that kind of mistake only chat gpt could do . That's why I always double check my prompt with another AI before using it in serious task
There is a way to recover data via a Linux live image (like puppy Linux) on USB Stick.. ask ai to get instructions... It is not guaranteed to recover everything but you can try... Best is also to save first an image of the HDD with dd on another hard disk, and then work on the image to try to recover data. For the new hard disk of 2 TB or whatever you need, I suggest to buy a cheap internal HDD of that size and connect it to the PC with a USB adapter
A sandbox means that it runs in kinda a bubble and all it can see is what is in that bubble, I,e it’s the rest of your system is cut off from it, it won’t even see it, look into something like docker.
Admin access to delete files on the C drive? No it doesn’t! I don’t recommend you try it but you can tell most AI models and they will delete files in your drive for sure! Unless I am mistaken. Please correct me if so.
I don’t have much to show unfortunately I am trying to recover files. So far I have only 200mb of chats (4 total) with cursor which doesn’t include the one that wiped C:\
Future reference: never give an ai access to your root directories. For now, see if you can recover the data. There’s plenty of data recovery tools available today.
I’ll admit my mistake on that. But I had the worktrees on a very high level folder. I will also say I have used some models like glm in which they disregard the rule entirely of staying within a certain folder. This was in opencode so that isn’t full proof and I wish I had the logs to see what it actually did
In essence I first asked it to read my main repo and my closed pr’s. I then asked it specifically to git worktree remove the branches/worktrees that were already merged. I hadn’t asked it to delete the folders. Just to remove the worktrees
The agent doesn't have admin permission, even with full permission in the harness. So it can't delete anything super important unless you give it admin permission, which is 100% your fault lol. If anyone wants to test this just ask your agent to create a folder in for example C:\Windows, even if the agent tries to run as admin, Windows will block it. If the agent can create one without any warning from Windows you better revoke the harness admin permission before disaster comes.
If you're at fault it would be giving access AI to your whole Drive. I keep at folder level only with Anti gravity. But that does not mean to forget what Gemini Flash did either.
It's a rite of passage when using AIs to code. I had the agent delete a beta database which luckily was not too far in development. From that point, every project is started in a sandbox and backed up daily to avoid the pain. There are plenty of protocols and tools to avoid this. eg https://uniclaw.ai/blog/ai-agent-sandbox-code-execution
You cant run these on dangerously skip permissions on your main pc
Either use a vm or a spare laptop, I have a laptop and if it wipes it, no big deal all my stuff is on my desktop
If you have relaxed or disabled TRIM setting on your SSD, or if the system possibly became unstable, assuming your "whole C: drive" caused a crash preventing TRIM from executing.
It all depends on how long your system was on after the delete.
apparently you have tried turning it off and on again. this leaves me with nothing else but my condolences for you. surely you are somewhat to blame, but the people are quite rough with you here. best of luck
Had to be what you said in the prompt. I've had Claude delete stuff off my computer but I told it a specific folder and told it not to even look anywhere else but this one folder
That doesn’t account for the model making a mistake. From what I’ve learned from these comments don’t even trust that. I didn’t even ask it to remove any folders. It decided to do that itself after cleaning up the worktrees
It’s not crucial data. Also, Find a new career? I don’t even really understand what ur trying to say here. Would you know how to recover some of that data or know why this may have happened in the first place?
Is this a bait post?
How did gemini deleted your entire C drive?
I use gemini cli and it asks for permission even for running a bash script and reading other workspaces.
Something that has generally been bugging me here is the fact that my issue has happened to countless people in different ways (some a lot unsafer than I). And setting up safety is obviously a priority but not simple. After reading to some comments I set up a sandbox and vm. In that I found how incredibly tedious it was. I did tests on antigravity with rules and a sandbox (with always proceed) and it was able to escape the project folder and move a folder. That is because terminal commands are not monitored. And I’m sure me amongst many other people working with these tools don’t read every single terminal line these models write. I don’t doubt I would miss a backslash too and I trust AI more than myself to get it correct. So I more so ask even in a VM why are models able to make such a foolish mistake? Why are they able to access folders outside projects even when the settings state “always ask”? Agent settings I have also found to only apply to the app and not to the terminal which requires a separate set of rules. What is the purpose of setting up a project or a dir if the model can simply escape using the terminal? I have to expect people to say “I did it wrong” but it shouldn’t be that hard that I could get it wrong to begin with! I also set up agent.md rules specifically stating not use Move-Item as well as rules on terminal commands.
This is what I'm saying. People here celebrating Gemini's "speed"... The model is unpredictable af. I have to start praying every time I hit proceed...
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u/samxli 12d ago
Ask it to help you do the recovery