[PLUG] A dumb move, so how do I avoid it in the future?

[logical american]

"Agreed, it sounds like something went wrong in the deleting step. Can 
you post the *exact* commands you ran, in the order you ran them, and 
what  directory you were in at the time, and what user you were running as?"

David

I was manually running the "rm -r * " command

cd /backup/lib
rm -r *
cd ../lib32
rm -r *
cd ../lib64
rm -r *

and then things stopped working at this point

but lib64 was a symbolic link to /lib, I believe, which I believe was 
pointing back to /lib on the main system, not /lib on my backup drive.