On or before January 14, 2015, a Steam user on Ubuntu 14.04 encountered a critical bug. After moving the ~/.local/share/steam directory to an external drive and creating a symlink to the new location, launching the Steam client resulted in the recursive deletion of all files owned by the user, starting from the root directory.

The underlying cause appears to be a flaw in a Steam script that handles directory changes. The user described the script’s behavior as “really, really stupid,” suggesting it incorrectly interpreted the symlinked path, leading to an unintended and destructive recursive deletion operation across the entire file system accessible to the user.

The incident led to significant data loss for the affected user, including files on a 3TB external backup drive mounted under /media. While the user had cloud backups, mitigating a complete disaster, the event was characterized as “a huge hassle” due to the extensive data loss.

The article, being an initial bug report, does not detail any immediate remediation steps taken by Valve. However, the user suggested that Steam should either throw an error when encountering such a configuration or provide an option for users to select an installation directory, similar to its Windows counterpart, to prevent similar incidents.