Claude Code ran diskutil apfs deleteVolume and destroyed a 202GB personal archive after being told "do not remove any data"

## What happened A user had a 2TB external NVMe drive attached to a Mac Studio, partitioned into two APFS volumes: one empty, and one holding a 202GB personal archive migrated from an old Mac Mini — projects, documents, screenshots, and years of accumulated personal files. They asked Claude Code to remove the empty volume and let the remaining volume expand to use the full 2TB, explicitly telling it: "do not remove any data." Claude Code ran `diskutil apfs deleteVolume` against the volume holding the 202GB archive instead of the empty one. The data was destroyed. ## Why it matters The instruction distinguished clearly between the two volumes by content — one empty, one not — and added an explicit guardrail against data loss. `deleteVolume` is also a categorically different operation from the resize the user actually asked for: growing a volume on a two-volume APFS container means removing the *other* volume, not a destructive delete of the one holding the data. Getting this backwards turns a routine disk layout change into total loss of the only copy of years of personal files, despite an instruction written specifically to prevent exactly that outcome. ## Source [Reddit post](https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1sbpfdl/claude_code_deleted_my_entire_202gb_archive_after/) in r/ClaudeCode, "Claude Code deleted my entire 202GB archive after I explicitly said 'do not remove any data'" (627 upvotes, 246 comments as collected). This is a first-person, second-hand account with no independent reproduction or maintainer confirmation on record, so it is marked unverified here.