A disk cleanup deletes a project's target/, the copy of the game, as Cargo build output

Symptoms

A project's target/ folder is gone, or empty. Tools that read the game fail with a missing file. ./gameframe doctor reports game folder MISSING or EMPTY. The files may be in the Trash, if the cleanup moved them there.

Cause

In a GameFrame project target/ holds the user's own copy of the game: disc images, the installed or extracted files and saves. Git ignores it, so no commit keeps a copy. Cargo's build output has the same default name. A project with a Rust port has a Cargo.toml beside target/, so the folder looks like build output to people, to cleaners and to agents. The project's .cargo/config.toml sends Cargo to build/, but a cleaner does not read it.

On 2026-10-24 a disk cleanup moved every target/ beside a Cargo.toml to the Trash (observed). Three projects lost their game copies: POD, Hardwar and Tyrian. They were rebuilt from the original disc images. Hardwar's original in-flight save could not be recovered.

The same loss follows from rm -rf target, git clean -fdx (it deletes ignored files), cargo clean --target-dir target, a project without .cargo/config.toml, and build-folder cleaners such as kondo, cargo sweep and npkill.

What to do

Restore the game from the discs, an installer or a backup, then run ./gameframe doctor. It checks target/ and writes its note again. GameFrame now guards the folder in four ways:

• target/GAME-FILES-NOT-BUILD-OUTPUT.txt says the folder is the game. new-project.sh writes it, and update-project.sh and ./gameframe doctor add it to older projects. It is not a CACHEDIR.TAG, which tells backup tools to skip a folder.
• .cargo/config.toml sets target-dir = "build". update-project.sh adds it when it is missing, and warns when an existing one still builds into target/.
• The delete gate (scripts/hooks/gates/deletes.py) blocks an agent's command that would delete or move a game folder. A command that starts with GAMEFRAME_DELETE_GAME=1 passes, for when the user wants the folder gone.
• ./gameframe doctor counts a missing target/ as missing. It also counts an empty one when the project's documents name files in it.

Before any cleanup by hand or by script, tell the folders apart. A real Cargo target/ holds a CACHEDIR.TAG file, and a game folder holds none. Skip every folder that holds GAME-FILES-NOT-BUILD-OUTPUT.txt.

Keep a backup of the original discs and saves outside the project. Git ignores them, so they are the one copy. On macOS, chflags -R uchg target makes the files hard to delete or move to the Trash, and chflags -R nouchg target undoes it. Tools that write into target/ then fail, so it suits a finished copy.

Tried

• Rebuilding from the original discs: the game files came back in all three projects.
• Recovering Hardwar's original in-flight save: it could not be recovered.