Public bug reported:

Hello,

this bug was originally reported on https://github.com/ubuntu/snapcraft-
desktop-helpers/issues/205 where I added a comment with my experience (
https://github.com/ubuntu/snapcraft-desktop-
helpers/issues/205#issuecomment-696781060 ). I thought creating a bug
report on Launchpad in addition would maybe help to track this issue.

The following has happened to me for two times so far:
1) Tried to start Chromium (one time it was via UI/.desktop file, one time it 
was by running 'chromium-browser' in terminal)
2) Chromium didn't launch but instead the helper script 'desktop-launch' (in 
/snap/chromium/1320/bin/desktop-launch) moved files and folders that are 
located on a separate partition to my home directory (detailed description 
below) until I killed it.

Luckily I had a backup, but it caused some work to restore everything.
Really eerie experience, when all of a sudden my files began to get
messed up.

My setup is as follows: The / and /home directory of my main
installation (Kubuntu 20.04) are on a SSD drive, while there is also a
much bigger HDD as a second drive where I store all of my "bigger" data
(photos, music, videos etc.). The HDD partition is mounted unter
/mnt/my_hdd and there are symbolic links in my home directory to its
directories (e.g. ~/photos is a symlink to /mnt/my_hdd/photos).

Now what desktop-launch seemed to do was to move the files and
directorys of this symlinked directories (HDD) to my home directory
(SSD). E.g. ~/photos/* (actually stored on /mnt/my_hdd/photos/) was
moved to ~/*. Subdirectories like photos/album1 were kept intact, but
all the content of the "top level folders" of my HDD (music, videos,
photos, ...) got mixed up together in my home directory. In both cases I
noticed there's something going wrong and managed to kill desktop-launch
after a short time, otherwise, it would have filled up all the small
space on my SSD.

This can be a cause of data loss without having a backup, because 1) it
destroys directory structures by moving files/folders from different
directories into one (as described above), and 2) related to that mv
could silently overwrite files with different ones which have the same
name.

Can I provide any further information to help to debug this? I'm not
sure how I can reproduce this, since in all cases except the two ones
recently Chromium startup worked just fine. Fortunately I'm using
Chromium only for testing purposes, so I don't launch it that often and
can make btrfs snapshots before doing so and taking that risk again.

Kind regards,
Jan

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 20.04
Package: chromium-browser (not installed)
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.4.0-48.52-generic 5.4.60
Uname: Linux 5.4.0-48-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu27.9
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: skip
CurrentDesktop: KDE
Date: Sat Oct  3 09:19:51 2020
InstallationDate: Installed on 2020-04-08 (177 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Kubuntu 20.04 LTS "Focal Fossa" - Beta amd64 (20200408)
SourcePackage: chromium-browser
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

** Affects: chromium-browser (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New


** Tags: amd64 apport-bug focal

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1898334

Title:
  When starting Chromium, desktop-launch sometimes moves personal files
  and folders on separate partition to my home directoy

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