Arduino IDE deletes entire contents of build.path directory

[bluepylons]

I set my build.path directory to my C:\Users<username>\Downloads folder, so that I could conveniently retrieve the .hex files if needed (There was a week-long period where the only AVR programmer I had was a cheap Chinese thing that used a proprietary program, and I needed the .hex files in a convenient spot to send via that). Unfortunately, I did not realize that Arduino IDE occasionally deletes the entire contents of its build path, and I lost the entirety of my Download folder's contents (which contained many, many, many non-Arduino files., including photographs, memes, old projects, etc., many of which were not backed up).

Can there either be:
1.) A smarter delete routine for the files in the build path so that it doesn't clear out any unrelated files, or:
2.) A huge warning to set your build path in a dedicated directory not shared with any other files.

(edit- fixed several typos)

[per1234]

I think the appropriate place to document this behavior is alongside the documentation of the build.path preference:
https://github.com/arduino/Arduino/blob/master/build/shared/manpage.adoc#preferences

I believe this is the only place the preference is officially documented.

For this particular use case, the IDE's Sketch > Export Compiled Binary is a more user friendly approach.

[bluepylons]

Thank you - I will do that in the future.

Unfortunately I was following a Sparkfun guide that I found off of a Google search, and any updates to the documentation warning of the potentially catastrophic file loss consequences (e.g. someone setting their build.path to their /My Documents/ folder and losing all of their documents) probably won't propagate along to 3rd party articles. If changing the behavior isn't viable (as it would be a fair amount of work to implement a smarter delete routine), would it instead be possible to include a warning as a comment in preferences.txt itself? (though it appears that preferences.txt may not support comments)