back to article Software support chap survived breaking his customer

Welcome once again, gentle reader, to the safe space we like to call Who, Me? wherein Reg readers may unburden themselves with tales of times their tech prowess might have let them down. In this week's instalment, our hero – who we will Regomize as "Percy" – totally got away with wrecking a client's machine purely because said …

  1. Korev Silver badge
    Coat

    So it was Percy the 9Gig?

    1. IanRS

      He started that way, but slimmed down to the 0Gig.

    2. Sam not the Viking Silver badge

      Percy didn't go to market.

      He should have stayed at home.

      He could have eaten roast beef.

      Or he could have had none.

      Percy nearly wee-weed all the way home.

  2. Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

    Ouch!

    Personally, I would be VERY reticent to remove files from a corrupted machine by deleting them. I like to make a back-up of any drive before touching the contents, so I can restore things I break. This may not have been an option for Percy, given the technical acumen of the user in question, and the remote access.

    I have spent many an hour trying to recover data OTHER people borked or deleted by various means, with varying degrees of success, I should add. I remember a case of a friend storing her entire PhD thesis on her hard drive without any back-up. Luckily I was able to recover well over 95% (this was in the days when Norton's Utilities for MS-DOS were REALLY useful). Once I had repaired most of the damage, I immediately proceeded to make TWO back-ups. One to store at her home, and one at my place (old school off-site back-up). Cost me quite some time, but the look of relief on my friend's face was more than worth it. She also gave me a nice bottle of wine for my efforts. She dutifully made weekly back-ups after that.

    1. GlenP Silver badge

      Re: Ouch!

      Norton's Utilities for MS-DOS were REALLY useful

      Absolutely...

      At one company we had a foreign student placement doing some translation for us. She spent a whole day writing a Word document, fine but she didn't once save it during the day and she then closed Word, still without saving.

      Thanks to Norton Utilities I was able to reconstruct the temp file (it wouldn't just undelete but I could hack the FAT) so that at least she had the wording back and could reformat it.

      Undelete was useful when I was switching between PC Compatibles (C: for the HD, A: for floppies) and ACT Apricot (A: for the HD, B: for floppies) when I accidentally did Format A: for the latter! fortunately I realised quickly and was able to recover the files.

      1. cookieMonster
        Pint

        Re: Ouch!

        OMG, that brings back so many memories. Thumbs up & a pint for that

        1. MiguelC Silver badge

          Re: Ouch!

          I remember in the early 90s helping a fellow student recover his work from the Temp folder in the public use computer after he somehow deleted it from his private network space.

          He was thankful for my help and horrified that his entire course work was available to all and sundry, if only they looked for it (as was the work of others, by the way...)

    2. collinsl Silver badge

      Re: Ouch!

      Stephen Fry has a similar story about recovering data for a script/book from Emma Thompson's computer back in the late 80s/early 90s. It came up in one of the early episodes of QI I think.

      1. Flightmode

        Re: Ouch!

        Apparently, it was the screenplay for Sense and Sensibility. Thank you Youtube! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PLScMCb-io

      2. hedgie Bronze badge

        Re: Ouch!

        That was a great episode, and though I love Sandi,[1] I still miss Stephen sometimes. Sorry, I'm digressing. But I loved seeing the two of them bantering about, clearly good enough friends that she could get away with teasing him a bit.

        [1] Out of the frequent panelists on the show, I couldn't see anyone but her taking on the mantle. The first series she did seemed a little uneven to me, and that was probably a combination of her finding her footing in the role and my own internal adjustment.

    3. JulieM Silver badge

      Re: Ouch!

      [T]his was in the days when Norton's Utilities for MS-DOS were REALLY useful
      Or, to put it another way, MS-DOS was incomplete.

      1. I could be a dog really Silver badge

        Re: Ouch!

        MS-DOS was incomplete

        I always described MS-Dos as "Unix with the useful bits removed".

    4. John Robson Silver badge

      Re: Ouch!

      "She also gave me a nice bottle of wine for my efforts. She dutifully made weekly back-ups after that."

      And posted one of those backups to you each week?

    5. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Ouch!

      Trinity recover disk (live Linux disk) with PhotoRec is the real winner IME. Cousin-in-law got hit by an early and fortunately dumb ransomware. It had written new files with encrypted contents and just deleted the old ones. It didn't try to overwrite the old files and as there was plenty of spare space they didn't get overwritten by other files being encrypted. Despite the name PhotoRec will try to piece together all sorts of file types, not just image, works out the correct file type but with arbitrary names onto a separate drive. Oh, the sheer overwhelming number of small image files from the browser cache....

      Shrink the old Windows partition, install Zorin with the old partition mountable if required and replace the recovered data from the USB drive and job done.

    6. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Ouch!

      working 1st line at a Uni mid 90's a student had her entire hon's thesis on one 3.5 floppy, well you can guess the rest.................................

      1. Korev Silver badge

        Re: Ouch!

        My uni had a miserly 1MB space for each student, but more space for email. I used to email myself files instead of saving them to the fileshare. When I did need to take files home on floppy I made sure I had three copies (I'd once had two go bad on me).

      2. John 110

        Re: Ouch!

        In my role as general IT support for a diagnostic lab in a teaching hospital in the 90s, I was asked to give a talk to our BSc Honours students to show them how to use the two DOS-based PCs that we had for general Word processing use. (Prior to acquiring those, our lecturers did papers by longhand and one of the office girls would type them up). I chatted to one of them a couple of days before I gave the talk and realised that they mostly knew the stuff like how to start and close Word, but they didn't have a clue about saving and backing up their work. They each had a floppy disk...(5.25, so genuinely floppy.)

        I re-jigged my talk to start with me holding up a floppy and saying "this is a disk". I then crumpled it up and said "and now it's corrupt and your thesis is gone..."

        Only then did I give them the talk about closing Word AFTER saving and BEFORE taking the disk out...

    7. -maniax-

      Re: Ouch!

      Don't leave us hanging....did she get her Doctorate?

    8. ibmalone

      Re: Ouch!

      Not so critical, but a couple of years ago a colleague's laptop bit the dust (can't remember why, battery had become dodgy I think). Could still be powered up, but the bitlockered disk got corrupted. Mostly things were backed up via onedrive, but some important folders hadn't been. Since they are the kind of person it's pleasant to help and this was a bit of a challenge, I thought I'd give it a try. The first steps are easy, live linux usb to boot and clone a copy of the encrypted disk it was then possible to use dislocker (and the recovery key, which we did have) to create a decrypted copy, but this was pretty mangled. From what I remember linux ntfs actually refused to even mount it. Using some iso mounter in windows (probably virtual clonedrive) it was possible to run windows's scan disk on it, which recovered a bit of the directory structure but not much. Going back to the the unmodified decrypted copy and trying DMDE achieved a bit more, we were able to recover quite a few of the files and fortunately it was mostly the directory listing to know what had been there that they really needed.

    9. StewartWhite Bronze badge
      Thumb Up

      Re: Ouch!

      I had to do similar with a friend's thesis (no backup again) in the days of DisplayWrite using Norton Utilities but with the added "fun" of having to manually create approx. two missing pages in EBCDIC so that DisplayWrite didn't complain about the file being corrupted. Took half a day but it all worked in the end bar the two missing pages which she was able to type in again from an older printed version fairly easily.

    10. Terry 6 Silver badge
      Headmaster

      Re: Ouch!

      "VERY reticent to remove files from a corrupted machine " Do you mean you wouldn't tell eanybody?

    11. This post has been deleted by its author

  3. ColinPa Silver badge

    delete is a two stage process

    I learned the hard way that delete is short hand for

    - Rename the file to have today's date and "DELETE" at the end.

    - Once you have rebooted a couple of times you can then delete it.

    You cannot always just recreate the file. For example

    - It has special attributes (which you did not check for before deleting the file) or attributes that only a super user can set

    - The file content may not be obvious such as tabs instead of spaces - you cant see them - but they are needed.

    It is a tough call when the disk has filled up.

    1. Caver_Dave Silver badge

      Re: delete is a two stage process

      Not always.

      I was filming people coming down a very long Zip line in Wales.

      Even with a 40x Zoom, I could not exactly identify who was coming down and ended up with 8 films with my family on the last.

      Went through on the camera menu and delete, delete, ..., delete one too many times.

      So, I took the memory card out and placed to one side while I got on with the rest of my day.

      When I got home, I loaded up the card on my PC and recovered the 7 files with other people on, and the 8th with my family could not be seen by any software I had loaded.

      Bit miffed!

    2. Jou (Mxyzptlk) Silver badge

      Re: delete is a two stage process

      In a modern OS you have snapshots. Should be activated by default.

      But Microsoft, in its endless wisdom, crippled the client-OS version of shadowcopy UI and cmdline tools. So I (shameless plug) created the text-UI that will do it for you. One which creates a scheduled task, which creates and cleans them according to sensible rules, but deactivated for you to inspect before you activate it. And the other to configure the windows settings or access them (you can use explorer previous versions too of course).

      Keep in mind: I could not work around that Microsoft client-OS has somewhere a hard coded 7 day limit on shadowcopies, the server-OS does not have that limitation and all those documented registry settings work as expected. Even though my tool does it better on a server than the builtin tool, the builtin at least works reliable with suitable defaults. If activated, of course.

      You cannot imagine how often I use it. Makes living so much easier.

      LUCKILY my pet bug of WIndows 11, reported since June 2022, got fixed with the April 2024 Update and it works with Windows 11 23h2 again. Before I was stuck with Windows 11 21h2.

  4. Ball boy Silver badge

    9Gb of unknown info wiped?

    This tale was set some years ago - 9Gb was probably a very substantial volume of data (it's not insignificant even now) and I'd be very reluctant to just wipe that without ensuring there was a recovery plan. Move it somewhere, perhaps but delete it? Not at my pay grade! :)

    He got a very lucky break discovering a 'hard reset' issue though!

    1. cookieMonster
      Trollface

      Re: 9Gb of unknown info wiped?

      Yeah,9Gb today = Microsoft notepad file with “This is a test” as the contents

    2. jwatkins

      Re: 9Gb of unknown info wiped?

      Yeah, I suspect it was more likely to be 9Mb.

    3. Elongated Muskrat Silver badge

      Re: 9Gb of unknown info wiped?

      To be fair, a 9GB file is almost five times the size that a lot of programs will choke on, many of which are coded, in their programmers' infinite wisdom, using signed 32 bit integers as file pointers.

      Try opening a text file that is one byte over 2GB in Notepad...

  5. Scott 53

    Picking the data to delete

    Back around the turn of the century, I'd often be asked to look at colleagues' Windows 95 machines - usually something simple like the disk being full. I remember being confronted with a machine like this, so deleted a load of temp files and emptied the Recycle Bin. Got a call later as the user had lost a file in their backup folder, namely the Recycle Bin. Taught me to ask in future, although I did of course roll my eyes at the idea of keeping important stuff there.

    1. Prst. V.Jeltz Silver badge

      Re: Picking the data to delete

      same applies to Outlook's bin / deleted whatever .

      People keep stuff in there!

      who knew!

      1. Flightmode

        Re: Picking the data to delete

        I've never stored things in Windows Recycle Bin or Outlook's Deleted Items (Gmail's Bin is another thing...), but for some reason I thought /tmp on Ubuntu was a good place to store files I needed for every run cycle of my inventory tool. Took me one whole server reboot before realizing THAT was a dumb idea.

        1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: Picking the data to delete

          Automatically clearing /tmp on reboot is not a good idea. The service that had its working file in there when the system crashed may be relying on it to recover on a restart.

          1. Bill Gray

            Re: Picking the data to delete

            I think (but am open to correction) that the idea is that /tmp is cleared during a (normal) shutdown, not on booting up. So if you boot up again after a crash, your files will be there; reboot normally, and they won't be.

            I've not actually tested that, though (hadn't even thought about it until now). I'll check next time I get a system crash. My various Linux boxes have all cleaned /tmp sometime between (normal) shutdown and reboot. If /tmp is indeed cleared on some systems at boot time, though, I'd invert your comment a bit : a service that keeps a working file in /tmp should assume it could be gone after a reboot, and should be keeping that file someplace else if that loss would be a problem.

            My FreeBSD box, on the other hand, doesn't clear /tmp automatically. I'd become accustomed to /tmp being cleared with each reboot on Linux, and had become somewhat casual about writing code that would leave files there. On the FreeBSD box, that resulted in accumulating long-since-useless files. (It really should have occurred to me, even before seeing this happen, that some machines are rebooted very infrequently, and that some people were doubtless running my code on such machines.)

            1. rafff

              Re: Picking the data to delete

              On my Linux boxen /tmp is a memory-mapped FS and so gets cleared/recreated on every restart; /var/tmp OTOH is on a real HD - and is much bigger.

              1. Bebu
                Windows

                Re: Picking the data to delete

                "On my Linux boxen /tmp is a memory-mapped FS and so gets cleared/recreated on every restart; /var/tmp OTOH is on a real HD - and is much bigger."

                From memory the System V SVID distinguished between /tmp (potentially volatile) and /var/tmp (necessarily persistent) but most Unix systems preserved /tmp across reboots and were normally cleared with a periodic cron job in the style of tmpwatch.

                It was "courageous" (as sir Humphrey would say) to use an evanescent MFS file system as enough not entirely clueless users would place files in subdirectories of /tmp and run their own periodic job to "touch" those files so they escaped the grim reaper. :)

                Disk space was tightly quota'd in those days as many of the classic BOFH tales will attest.

                1. doublelayer Silver badge

                  Re: Picking the data to delete

                  "It was "courageous" (as sir Humphrey would say) to use an evanescent MFS file system as enough not entirely clueless users would place files in subdirectories of /tmp and run their own periodic job to "touch" those files so they escaped the grim reaper."

                  Or it was the necessary condition to educate them that temporary directories are actually temporary, not just extra storage provided if you thought to use it. It had to be pretty obvious that the quotas on their home directories existed for a reason, namely that disk wasn't unlimited. Using a different directory for temporary data was acceptable, while trying to use it to bypass the quota was not.

                  I often create a ramdisk on my systems because I have processes that generate gigabytes of actually temporary files, so storing them in memory makes the operations on them faster and doesn't wear my disk storing data. I know that if the computer loses power that the operations on those temporary files need to start again. That's why the ones I put there are truly temporary. Losing data there is a good reminder that it isn't intended for important files. That's what I have a nonvolatile disk for.

            2. doublelayer Silver badge

              Re: Picking the data to delete

              Don't count on that. On some systems, /tmp is stored in RAM. Disconnect power and /tmp is wiped. I write software to assume this will happen, which means if I need something to recover from a crash, it has to go somewhere else, such as /var/tmp, although a dedicated location for the program is more likely.

          2. DS999 Silver badge

            Re: Picking the data to delete

            The service that had its working file in there when the system crashed may be relying on it to recover on a restart

            Any programmer using /tmp that way should be shot, have a stake driven through his heart and brain in case he's either a vampire or a zombie, then drawn and quartered and his arms and legs shot again.

            /tmp has been cleared on reboot by default for many years, on some systems like Linux it isn't possible to preserve /tmp because it isn't a real filesystem its memory mapped swap space. Any system on which such a strategy worked was purely a coincidence, and was waiting for an OS patch or configuration change by the sysadmin before it no longer worked.

            1. J.G.Harston Silver badge

              Re: Picking the data to delete

              Here is where I brush the crumbs out of my beard and mention the system I worked on which had SET TMP=C:\DOS ....

      2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: Picking the data to delete

        "same applies to Outlook's bin"

        As no email client I've seen makes much provision for managing messages it usually seems to be that or the inbox, neither of which is really appropriate. Maybe there's Archive on some menu somewhere - who knew?

        1. Elongated Muskrat Silver badge

          Re: Picking the data to delete

          Really? Pretty much every email client I have ever used (Outlook, and the long lamented Outlook Express included) has allowed the creation of arbitrary client-side (and usually server side too) folders. I make extensive use of these on my work laptop, alongside email rules to filter the array of emails I receive into some sort of sensible selection of "buckets" for me to deal with on a daily basis.

          1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

            Re: Picking the data to delete

            Seamonkey also makes provision for this and I use it like that. It's a faff to set up so the average punter will not do it. That's why so many system admins report users storing previously read mail in either the inbox or in the bin. It's been commonly observed user behaviour for years.

            It's also possible to ensure that Sent mail and incoming mail end up in the same folder so that they get properly threaded. It just doesn't happen out of the box. Of course suggest that it does and some Stockholm Syndrome sufferer will be along to tell you that that's not how they work because they've been used to having something so useless that they regard it as normal.

            Is it not beyond email client developers to produce something a bit more joe-public-user friendly?

        2. Terry 6 Silver badge

          Re: Picking the data to delete

          Thunderbird does. Easy to create folders for stuff. Annoyingly they broke the add-on that allows users ( like me) to sort the folders.by priority. Mozilla seem to be following Microsoft's fetish of making file and folder order alphabetical (as in the Start menu) only and no changes.I believe there's a patch in Betterbird that allows folder sorting.

          1. PRR Silver badge

            Re: Picking the data to delete

            > Thunderbird does. Easy to create folders for stuff.....a patch in Betterbird that allows folder sorting.

            Mozz keeps forking things up. Lately I have two folders Sent and Sent_Mail, 73MB different. Looks like recent contents are the same, one may have more old messages. Last week I had two TRASH folders. Messages from my lover often arrive an hour late (that may be the gMail server).

            Manually sort folders (Jonathan Protzenko) (incompatible with Thunderbird 115.10.1) worked until last year. It may still be good for SeaMonkey.

            1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

              Re: Picking the data to delete

              If it's in Tbird today it'll be in SM soon. it's just following the same path of ill-thought out UI. Calendar, for instance, used to have an icon on the status bar; one click brought it up. Now it's part of the tabbed email client interface whether you want it like that or not. But surely that means you'll be able to configure it so that he tab will be there as soon as the client launches? No, it isn't. You click on the Events and Tasks select Calendar from the drop-down box to create the tab - but AFAICS there's no way to configure it so that you don't have to do that each time. A slight thing but it's just one little part of the UI getting clunkier as time goes on.

          2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

            Re: Picking the data to delete

            Yes it's easy to create folders. Wouldn't it be great if the email client was able to automate the use of them. Say you have a folder for financial stuff. What if you were able to flag an email domain in the address book such as mybank.com as financial so that every email you sent to an address in the domain would be stored there and, after you'd read it, every email received from the domain would automatically be filed there, not as some sort of filter that you have to specify but something you could set up by, say, clicking on a list of the folders because the email client designer realised that that would make life a lot easier for the sort of users who don't go round specifying filters to do it?

      3. aerogems Silver badge
        Coat

        Re: Picking the data to delete

        That's why that thing by your desk is called a "low-profile circular/rectangular open-top filing cabinet." The "janitor" just comes along each night to take everything to an off-site storage location.

      4. usbac

        Re: Picking the data to delete

        I once had a boss (IT director) that stored all of his important saved email in the Deleted Items folder. I found out after setting up our Group Policy to empty the Deleted Items folder on shutdown!

        1. Excused Boots Silver badge

          Re: Picking the data to delete

          Many many moons ago, I did run into a similar situation. Bored of arguing with a middle manager about this, frankly I could have not bothered as it was a company mandated policy, anyway I picked up a few papers from his desk, asked him if these were important and then dumped them in his wastebasket.

          When he protested that these documents were vitally important and how dare I, to his credit he stopped, and said, ‘yes OK I see what you are saying, it won’t happen again’

          Physical demonstration for the win!

    2. phuzz Silver badge

      Re: Picking the data to delete

      Once upon a time, my boss, the head of IT, and not an untechnical person, asked me to have a look at an Outlook issue on his machine while he was in a meeting. Out of habit I emptied the deleted items folder and fixed whatever the issue was (something calendar based?).

      When he got back, he got quite annoyed, as his filing system for emails was to hit delete on any email he didn't immediately require, and would go back through his deleted items for anything he needed later, ie, for him "Del" was a hotkey to send any email to his 'less important' folder. He started to get angry with me, then realised this was a problem entirely of his own making and had to settle with being angry with himself. A good boss :)

      Have you changed your email habits yet Malc? ;)

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: Picking the data to delete

        "his filing system for emails was to hit delete on any email he didn't immediately require"

        Something that a "Pending" option would deal with very neatly. Even better if it could be configured to put a task in the task list.

      2. Bebu
        Thumb Up

        Re: Picking the data to delete

        《He started to get angry with me, then realised this was a problem entirely of his own making and had to settle with being angry with himself. A good boss :)》

        A good human being.

    3. chivo243 Silver badge
      Devil

      Re: Picking the data to delete

      Just don't look in the "private" folder... even if it is 9gigs... no amount of mind bleach can erase it.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Picking the data to delete

      Guess how I discovered my idiot roommate stored his plasticware in the oven?

      After 3 sessions of cleaning melted plastic from the racks, they stopped doing that. Mainly because I threw his ass out.

      And it wasn't because we were short on storage cabinets.

    5. Bebu
      Windows

      Re: Picking the data to delete

      "their backup folder, namely the Recycle Bin."

      I thought this was apochryphal... until I encountered it. :)

      Another user with a high end (when he bought it) mac notebook, always suspended?/hibernated? he never powered it off and never closed an application or window so when it was getting a bit slow he brought it to me.

      Pretty much modelled his physical desk - the bottom layer of which was definitely in the Carboniferous. :)

      Ended up getting a new mac (rinse and repeat. ;) I let (insisted) the apple people migrate his files and settings. ;)

  6. Prst. V.Jeltz Silver badge

    Within his accounts data there were a bunch of large folders that shouldn't have been there

    C'mon Percy , at least try to put 2 & 2 together

    Thats quite the coverup , losing 9 years of finance sounds like a big deal, although we dont know if the files would have been salvageable had Percy attempted to look at them further.

    Also powering the PC off at the plug is top tier user incompetence that really drains your sympathy levels.

    1. DS999 Silver badge

      It is almost certain

      Those files were completely intact when Percy deleted them. The problem the user had corruption in the active data - stuff that was being read and written. Data just sitting there not being read or written in that 9 GB folder would have been affected by those unclean shutdowns.

  7. Fr. Ted Crilly Silver badge

    Was...

    The 9 GB of purest green garbage?

    1. collinsl Silver badge

      Re: Was...

      Oh, Edmund! Could it be that I hold in my hard drives a lump of purest green?

      1. ibmalone

        Re: Was...

        I didn't notice back then, but now I wonder if there's another layer to that joke. If it was Pratchett I'd be sure, but the Blackadder authors were reasonably clued up historically[1]. Alchemists never did succeed in creating gold (unless you count a handful of atoms in modern particle accelerators), but over time the discipline gave rise to chemistry, and the earliest profitable industry that came about from that was dye manufacture; William Henry Perkin's discovery of a synthetic purple (but later also "Perkin's green"). So what Percy had, several centuries early, was potentially a successful product.

        [1] Even if they mostly parody historical dramas. There's a long forgotten film (rightly so) called "Hawk the Slayer" that makes the end of season 1 make sense. Although it's not really worth watching just for that.

        1. Prst. V.Jeltz Silver badge

          Re: Was...

          “I once punched a bloke in the face for saying ‘Hawk the Slayer’ was rubbish, when what I should have said ‘Dad, you’re wrong.’”

          — Bill Bailey

  8. Camilla Smythe

    The move from HP to Windows.

    Ah yes. I remember when part of the lab made a transition from one particular piece of test equipment originally running on a HP (Huge Price) computer to some new shiny that plugged into a Windows box. End of day the owner would hit the off button on the HP which would gracefully shut down. Naturally the owner continued this practice on the Windows box which eventually, quite quickly, decided to fall over causing a bit of consternation and confusion along with a few tidy ups and reinstallations. Then I saw him do his usual end of day lack of shutdown and introduced him to shutdown.bat

  9. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    Surely Windows/MS-DOS has a file move command?

    1. Jonathon Green

      It does/did indeed,

      However you need somewhere to move this stuff to for safe keeping, and depending on exactly how long ago this was that may not have been a trivial consideration…

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        The 9 gig was already sitting there. It wouldn't require additional space providing, of course, that the move command just moves the references to it to a different directory. Directories/folders are logical constructs, not physical ones. It' shouldn't require the actual data to be shunted around. As I said, it's been a long time but I don't remember the Microsoft approach being any different to the Unix way in this respect.

        1. PB90210 Silver badge

          I think it changed at some point (along with the change from 'directories' to 'folders') from creating replacement files to just changing the pointer

    2. Sceptic Tank Silver badge
      Devil

      Don't anybody move!

      Hm.... "The command is available in MS-DOS versions 6 and later."

      1. ibmalone

        Re: Don't anybody move!

        Can't confirm the timeline (online version histories are not detailed enough), but XTree can supposedly do directory-entry moves, the last version was 1993 and DO 6 was released that same year. It's possible xtree provided the feature before DOS natively did, there were other 3rd party utilities around at the time that provided disk copying features and the like so it's not impossible something provided a move facility. (On the other hand, remote access and 9GB both suggest Windows era rather than DOS. Don't know if remote control of a DOS box was possible at the time, but doubt it was common.)

        1. keith_w

          Re: Don't anybody move!

          it was, using (I think) PC Connect which supported both dial-up and network connections. One place I was working had an employee living in New York and dialing in (9600bpi) to a computer in our computer room (early 90's) and working on that, and a few years later I used it manage NT 3.51 and 4 servers in our offices across Canada (Frame Relay).

        2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: Don't anybody move!

          "Don't know if remote control of a DOS box was possible at the time, but doubt it was common."

          Percy was using remote access.

          1. doublelayer Silver badge

            Re: Don't anybody move!

            "Percy was using remote access."

            Hence people considering that it probably wasn't DOS the computer was running. Remote access was the basis, the OS in use was what they were trying to guess.

            1. Jou (Mxyzptlk) Silver badge

              Re: Don't anybody move!

              Ever heard of PC Anywhere for DOS? And that is not the only program for such tasks.

              1. doublelayer Silver badge

                Re: Don't anybody move!

                True, although the other clue that this probably wasn't DOS was that the temporary data was 9 GB of data covering 11 years of business. While it is possible to have a DOS machine with 9 GB of storage space, it's not very likely and probably wouldn't have been a single directory containing the lot.

  10. K555

    Saved by the cloud?

    "Of course nowadays it would all be cloud-synced so no big issue."

    This was a place with it's data on a PC and no backup. Nowadays, this would be the place where you then find the 'cloud sync' hadn't worked for 24 months and nobody noticed.

    1. yetanotheraoc Silver badge

      Re: Saved by the cloud?

      For example they only paid for 5 GB of cloud storage.

      1. Elongated Muskrat Silver badge

        Re: Saved by the cloud?

        More likely, they have paid for 500TB of cloud storage and never used it.

    2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Saved by the cloud?

      I found a place where the over-night backup to the hot standby hadn't worked (because the data had grown to big to be copied in the time available) for who knows how long and nobody'd noticed.

  11. trevorde Silver badge

    9 GB of files can only be one thing ...

    ... pr0n!

    1. Marcelo Rodrigues
      Devil

      Re: 9 GB of files can only be one thing ...

      Only 9GiB?

      Too little for pron. Mist be something useful instead.

  12. Niek Jongerius

    Sigh

    Lately there seems to be an influx of these "ooh-I-messed-up-better-lie-about-it" stories. It is sad to see people trying to save their butts instead of owning up to their mistakes. The only thing I am left with here is a sense of disgust.

  13. Marty McFly Silver badge
    Coat

    Security for the win!

    "The customer was storing financial data in entirely the wrong place on the drive so that it looked like junk. "

    Usually "Security by Obscurity" is a big InfoSec no-no. However, in this case making important data look like junk fooled even the resident admin. Certainly it will fool any threat actor searching the system!

    Mission Accomplished!

  14. chivo243 Silver badge
    Windows

    so many times

    I lost track of how many times a user has demonstrated what they think is shutdown... shut off monitor,Check! Push power button for a second(sleep!)Check! Push power button until death comes to the box Check! However, I must say always pulling the plug gets the crown... I did once help a home user who had everything on a powerstrip, and used the on\off button on the strip to power down everything, cpu, monitor, printer, AP and desk light. I tried to get them to understand that shutting down the computer from the start?menu was a good thing, dumb looks ensued.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: so many times

      "I tried to get them to understand that shutting down the computer from the start?menu was a good thing, dumb looks ensued."

      Properly explained it should eb obvious. Shutdown is just a process like any other. It has to be started. Where would expect to see the command to start it?

      Meanwhile Northern Powergrid has been a big help in arranging shutdown on devices on my home network,

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: so many times

      https://www.digital-kaos.co.uk/forums/showthread.php/541137-Abbott-amp-Costello-s-Cyber-Routine

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Many years ago, I had a frightening experience. A friend of a friend was introduced me to someone as a person who might be able to help him recover corrupted data on his Compaq 386 laptop. (that shows the age of this story). I agreed to meet the guy in a cafe and ‘have a look’ at the machine.

    I managed to run scandisk and took a look at the some of the files that it recovered. There were a lot of very threatening letters about blackmailing people with lots of unpleasant and violent language. I had to make a quick choice between deleting them or returning the laptop with them intact and ‘unread’ to this really rather big guy! I am ashamed to say I did the latter, and have wondered many times since whether I should have gone to the police. But baring in mind that the police were probably still using typewriters and carbon paper at that time, what would they have done?

    Normally I post using my account... but this time I chose to remain anonymous.

    1. Antron Argaiv Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      Wise choices, the return, the silence and the anonymity. He would have known who dropped the dime.

  16. NITS

    Just a couple of weeks ago a chap I know closed a months-old ticket concerning a user's repeated corruption of the config files for a particular mission-critical application. The vendor's support folks hadn't been able to figure it out. In the log files it became apparent that a proper Windows shutdown was not occurring. Not only was the user failing to exit the application, he was in the habit of pressing-and-holding the power button to shut down his machine at the end of the day. It was faster that way, and nobody had ever told him not to do it that way, so why not?

  17. Bebu
    Windows

    Procedures

    I remember very early days when typists were being given PCs for document preparation (floppy based, wordperfect, Sperry PCs + Diablo printers) they were trained in the start up and shutdown procedures to the point of being instinctive.

    Even until recently many PCs (windows/linux/etc) in student labs had labels with the shutdown steps.

    Seems peculiar that a small business owner purchases (or leases) a turnkey system (hardware + software) with support and no one thinks to cover these basics and backup, achiving and recovery - business continuity in general.

    As this installment illustrates it is an all too common story.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Procedures

      "no one thinks to cover these basics [in training]"

      But everyone knows Windows. At least that's that you'll be told if you suggest changing OS.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like