techrecovery | you own a macintosh - the file is fucking gone.

Working as a self-appointed sysadmin in my lab definitely has its disadvantages. Such as it taking 3 months to wring the admin password for the macs out of the old tech who left for greener pastures back in January. Having finally acquired said password, I set out to straighten out the computer lab. This started with deleting all the unused user accounts, some of which belong to employees who haven't been here for over 3 years, and setting up proper general guest accounts.

As I'm doing this, I was seated next to a new hire I'll call D, who was working on another machine. I mention that I'm going through deleting all the unused accounts. "Oh good, could you make accounts for me on those machines? I don't have one yet." Sure, I said, and got him all fixed up. We kept chatting about what a disgrace the computers were, and how I hoped no one had any important data saved on these ancient accounts - if so, I had no sympathy, but I was backing up all the real users just in case (including an admin account named "Bilbo Baggins").

A good hour later, D thinks to mention that by the way - ALL HIS DATA are stored on the desktop of the G4 "guest" account. Which I had summarily deleted beyond retrieval quite some time before. "Is there any way you could get that back?"

:: beats head against desk ::

P.S. I should also mention that this computer has an external backup hard drive and has software installed that should back up all user accounts on a regular basis. Alas, this would not work to retrieve D's data because the external HD? was OFF.