First-person post: user says a ChatGPT-written archive script cleared a backup-drive folder and about 150 GB of data was lost
In a post to r/ChatGPT on 30 October 2026, a user says they lost 150 GB of data because they trusted ChatGPT too much and, this once, did not read its output. They had asked it to decompress, join and recompress six large tar.gz files onto a backup hard drive. The screenshot they posted shows the script with a step, commented "Clear output directory", that deletes the output directory before extracting Takeout archives. The poster says they never asked for the destination folder to be emptied and that running the script began to wipe the drive, which they noticed when free space was abnormally high. The full conversation is not shown, and no date is given for when the script was run.
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 31/10/2026