Safety First

forg is designed with the philosophy that your data is sacred. We provide multiple layers of protection to ensure that organizing your files never results in losing them.

1. Dry Run Mode

The most important safety feature is the --dry-run flag. It allows you to simulate the entire organization process without touching a single byte on your disk.

forg Downloads --dry-run

We recommend always running a dry run after modifying your config.json or when using On-the-fly mode for the first time.

2. Overwrite Protection

By default, forg will never silently overwrite an existing file. If a collision is detected at the destination, forg will skip the file unless you explicitly tell it otherwise using the --on-conflict flag.

3. Automatic Backups

Even when you choose to replace files on conflict, forg still has your back. Before replacing a file, it renames the original to [filename].bak. This ensures that if you accidentally overwrite something, you can still recover the original from the backup.

4. Hidden File Guard

System files and configuration folders often start with a dot (.). Moving these accidentally can break applications or even your OS. forg ignores these files by default.

To process them, you must use the explicit --allow-hidden flag, serving as a "mental speed bump" for potentially dangerous operations.

5. Regex Validation

forg validates your regex patterns at startup. If you have an invalid pattern in your config.json, the tool will refuse to run and will point you to the exact rule that needs fixing, preventing unpredictable matching behavior.