Possibly. Nobody seems to have discerned the root cause of the issue either :/ I'll close this issue if I can verify that this is a duplicate of #6543, as some details seem to differ.
In an attempt to resolve this issue myself, I am wiping my Steam partitions, and installing the Steam Client Beta, to see if the issue persists...
@byte1024 It is hardly overcomplicating anything to have a Steam library on another drive (the ability to have multiple library locations exists precisely for it!), which would necessitate a different partition. It is clearly not my fault that this issue has occurred -- it is very likely an issue with the Steam Client. After all, in no circumstance should Steam be randomly deleting steamapps/common, and I see no reason why partitioning would cause it to do that!
Oh, it seems that they deleted their comment. What @byte1024 was saying is that I am overcomplicating stuff by having my Steam library on a separate partition, and that experienced developers are unable to account for that.
What I actually meant was that overcomplicating things tend to cause problems that devs didn't take into account or test. They can't test everything. They can't do everything.
Its difficult to say that the OP here didn't do that. Steam obviously works with partitions but people tend to eg use NTFS or other things that can cause issues such as the linked issue.
Keep it simple.
I deleted it because I changed my mind before the OP replied. I figured OP would take issue with it.
I've heard that issues can come about when using certain filesystems, however, that is not my case. To clarify, my setup is that I have a partition each on my ssd and hard drive, both of which are formatted as Ext4 (they are dedicated to Steam, as I don't want to have to redownload my games library if I ever have to switch distro, but here I am downloading hundreds of gigabytes hoping that they won't be nuked again :woman_facepalming:). I understand that many users have a similar setup to mine, so it shouldn't be a factor in this issue.
I realise that I haven't given much info on my setup here, so sorry for any confusion @byte1024 :)
Nothing extracted yet.
Your system information
Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:
Yesterday, I attempted to launch a game through Steam. It did not launch. I restarted the Steam client, and saw that all of my games were entirely gone. This has happened 3 times now, despite reinstalling the Steam client entirely. Interestingly, Proton and Steamworks remained in the default library location (all of my games are installed on two different libraries on separate partitions). Games were downloading or updating all the times this issue occurred, so that may or may not be the reason for my issue. Notably, the entire common folder is gone from the library location in which a game was not being installed to.
Steps for reproducing this issue: