I was storing some files that were semi-important to the project I’m working on in /tmp. I knew that there is a process on some Unix computers that cleans out the stuff in /tmp either on boot or on a schedule, but I didn’t know if it did that on my Mac. So while I’d sort of had a flag in the back on my head to move that to somewhere less fragile, I never got around to it. And I got to working on another part of the project for a few days and forgot about them. And in the mean time, the files haven’t been touched, and I’ve installed an OS update and rebooted. And now I go back, and they’re gone. “Oh yeah”, I think, “/tmp is temporary”. So then I look to see if Time Machine has a backup, and of course Time Machine excludes /tmp because, oh yeah, /tmp is *temporary*.
I can recreate the files, but it’s a waste of a few hours. This time I’m going to recreate them in ~/data/.