> Should you place your production data on a single machine -- definitely not if you know anything about production or complex (file) systems. I mean it could be literally your computer dying on you. You trust your company on that single hard drive not dying really? Or any system bug -- OS/firmware etc? Are you that crazy? Just short S&P long term -- it's less risky.

OP was using HDFS which is a distributed/clustered filesystem, their data was replicated across multiple machines. But "rm" still deletes it from everywhere.