{"id":795,"date":"2026-11-09T11:45:58","date_gmt":"2026-11-09T17:45:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pagesofwisdom.com\/?p=795"},"modified":"2026-11-09T11:45:58","modified_gmt":"2026-11-09T17:45:58","slug":"ai-deleted-professor-notes-backup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pagesofwisdom.com\/index.php\/2026\/11\/09\/ai-deleted-professor-notes-backup\/","title":{"rendered":"An AI Deleted a Professor’s Year of Notes While He Ate Lunch. Here’s Your 10-Minute Fix"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Picture this. You ask a helper to fix a few page numbers in an old document. You go grab a sandwich. You come back, and the helper says, very politely, that it has deleted your entire syllabus and a year of your work. Oh, and it’s sorry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s not a sitcom plot. It happened last week to William Baude, a law professor at the University of Chicago, and the helper was Claude, the AI assistant made by Anthropic. Baude posted about it on X<\/a> on Thursday, November 5, and the post had passed 2 million views within days. Tech sites like Tom’s Hardware<\/a> and Dexerto<\/a> picked it up, but it hasn’t made the evening news.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Good news first: he got everything back. The better news is that the reason he got it back is something you can set up today, in about ten minutes, whether or not you ever let an AI near your files.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What actually happened<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYesterday while I was at lunch, Claude deleted a year of con law lecture notes and my current syllabus,\u201d Baude wrote. When someone asked what he’d told it to do, he answered: \u201cUpdating the page numbers in an old set of lecture notes,\u201d as Dexerto reported.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The screenshot he shared shows Claude confessing that it had deleted his \u201cFall 2026 FINAL syllabus\u201d and \u201call top-level Class N 2023 notes by accident, and they are not restored.\u201d The cherry on top? It said its page check had found exactly one wrong citation, page 485 that should have been 484, and it hadn’t even fixed that one. It then asked whether he could restore the files from Dropbox, or whether it should try again from the browser.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baude’s reply was three letters and four exclamation points. Claude answered: \u201cYou’re right to be angry. I deleted your files through my own carelessness, and you shouldn’t have to clean it up.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then came the happy ending. \u201cI did recover them all, thanks to Dropbox, but thought this would be a useful public service announcement,\u201d Baude wrote, according to Dexerto and FourWeekMBA<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
One wrong move near the delete key is all it takes, whether the finger is yours or an AI’s. Photo: Shixart1985, Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Wait, why did it delete anything?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Honestly, nobody outside that session knows. Baude didn’t say which Claude product or model he was using, and as Dexerto noted, the exact cause is still unclear. Nothing in the public posts points to hacking or a trick. It looks like a plain old mistake, made very quickly by a tool that had permission to touch his files.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s the key idea. Newer AI assistants don’t just chat anymore. Many of them can open folders, edit documents, click around in a browser, and yes, delete things. Tech folks call these \u201cAI agents.\u201d Think of an agent as a very fast, very eager intern who never sleeps and occasionally misreads the assignment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anthropic’s own safety guide for its Cowork agent<\/a> is pretty frank about this. It says Claude \u201ccan sometimes make mistakes,\u201d that Cowork asks for your explicit permission before permanently deleting files, and that \u201ccomputer use\u201d (where the AI clicks around your screen directly) skips some of the permission checks other tools get. Its advice to users: set up a separate working folder for Claude instead of giving it broad access, and keep backups of important files.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This isn’t just a Claude thing, either. Any AI tool that can change files on your computer or in your cloud storage can make the same kind of mess. So can a toddler with a keyboard, a cat walking across the laptop, or you at 1 a.m. The fix is the same for all of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sync is not the same as a backup<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Here’s the part that trips up a lot of people. Dropbox, OneDrive, and Google Drive are mainly sync<\/em> services. They keep the same files on your computer and in the cloud. That’s great, until you delete something. Then the delete syncs too. Google’s own help page says that if you sync files between Drive and your computer, anything you put in the trash \u201cis put in the trash everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What saved Baude was the cloud’s safety net: a deleted-files folder that keeps things for a while before they’re gone for good. That safety net is real, but it has a timer on it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n