This has put a complete stop to my day.
Today I ran across the problems with gvfs (Gnome Virtual File System-Not to be confused with gnomevfs).
About a month ago I connected to a 'large' website via FTP on my Ubuntu box. I made the connection through Nautilus... I did not check remember the password. Today, I was backing up my home directory, when I notice the backup grabbing a directory
/.gvfs/user@xftpsite.com/web/thewebsite. Well thats odd no? I opened up that directory, saw what looked like a local download of said website. Then assuming it was a local copy, I started to delete the directory. WRONG IDEA! I quickly stopped the delete task, started to sweat, and realized I almost deleted the whole website that resided on that ftp site. Big whoop right? My own stupidity...well..wrong. Not only did I not know I was still connect to this ftp site, I never saved the password. This happend because gvfs 'mounts' virtual filesystems in the home directory...something in my opinion that should never hapen. Besides that, gvfs should have clossed the connection to the ftp site after closeing nautilus. It did not, I finally managed to close the connection with the commands ps aux | grep gvfsd-ftp -- found the process id and kill -9. This finally disconnected to the FTP connection. THIS SHOULD NOT HAPPEN ON A LTS DIRTIBUTION. It was a bad idea to switch from gnomevfs to gvfs. I have to say, I am contemplating switching to a more traditional linux os.