techrecovery | (no subject)

It's been a while since I had a call really worth posting about. Today, I got that call.
Customer called in saying that she'd just tried using our app for the first time since $coworker fixed a problem for her last week and some of her files were missing. She'd looked in My Documents because she remembered that's where $coworker had put the problem files, and not only were our files not there, but nothing was - all her Word documents, the lot was gone. The machine had been crashing a bit, and she was moving to a new one next week, but she needed to get her work done today.

I remoted in and had a look - sure enough, nothing there. I had a bit of a poke around in c:\documents and settings, and found that My Documents wasn't in her user folder. She was a bit hopeless, and $coworker had been helping show her how to copy her backups to a USB stick, so I assumed maybe she'd been doing that, got it wrong and accidentally moved the whole of My Documents somewhere. Had her put her stick in, and nope, not there. Searched the whole machine, C: E: and the stick, just to be sure, and nothing. The only files with our extension on were in a folder on C:, and those were the handful still showing up in her app, and her backups on the stick. E: contained only a data folder, with a folder that had the same name as the one our app puts into My Documents for its files. Alarm bells should have started ringing as soon as I saw that, but she'd called at 5 to lunch, we'd already been on the call for an hour and I don't think particularly well when I'm over-hungry.
I copied the most recent backups of her files to the folder where the others were, fixed and re-imported them so she could get some work done, and really that should have been the end of it, but as I was finishing up, she mentioned that maybe she'd accidentally put her files on the new USB floppy drive she'd had set up because her internal one was broken. Impossible, because they're all database files about 5MB, but in case there was some evidence of an attempt to copy - like the log files - I asked her to put one of those floppies in, and asked her what drive letter it was. She said E:. Finally the alarm bells rang. E: was a 40GB internal drive. Other than A: C: E: and the stick, there was nothing showing up. I asked her what the last thing she'd done with her floppies had been and she told me she'd got a new pack of floppies, and formatted them, just as she'd been shown, by right-clicking on E: and hitting format.
I checked her registry. Sure enough, at some point in the dim and distant, My Documents had been moved to E:\data.
I explained to her what had happened to her files and that it had probably been the chap who had apparently fitted this USB floppy drive for her because E: was actually My Docs. I'm not sure she entirely understood what I was saying, but she was pleased to know I'd found out what had happened and that it wasn't her fault. She also thought she probably had a backup CD from a while ago she could get at least her template Word docs from if not the actual letters, and she kept hard copies of most things so it wasn't as bad as it could have been.
The machine chose then to freeze, so she said as it took ages to reboot that she might as well go to lunch, and asked if it was alright to call back later to get some help moving to the new computer. I was dying to get away myself so off I put an alert on her account to not let her talk to anyone else if she called back before I got back or if I was on a call, and legged it.
After lunch, I called her back, and said that we might as well move to the new computer straight away and she could do her work on that. Out of curiosity, I had her follow the cable on the USB drive - it was connected to a hub with nothing else attached, not even a cable back to her - or anyone else's computer. How the hell someone apparently making a living as an IT bod could not only make a mistake like that but not notice the drive didn't light up AND not recognise the difference between the icon for a USB floppy and one for a hard drive called Local Disc E: I don't know, but I wanted to hurt him quite badly. I got her to say she'd get him to call me when he comes in Monday to have a look at the apparently-dying machine.
I copied all her files to her USB stick, remoted into the other machine got the app installed, copied the files into the default location and got them into the app, then also set up a separate backups folder, and shortcuts on her desktop to that and the USB stick. I also talked her through making a backup and then copying it to the stick using the shortcuts, (with the backups folder set to always have the newest files at the top so it's easier for her to find them) and stuck a set of instructions on her desktop in a .txt file just in case she forgot it when she has to do it again next week.
OK, doing all that was above and beyond, but I figured she deserved it. If I'd just had five years work wiped out by some little tit I'd paid to help me, I'd have been spitting feathers, but she was nice as pie through the whole call, and, I later discovered, emailed my boss to say how much she appreciated us. I'd rather never have to deal with another customer screwed over by their IT bod, but I have to say I wish more customers were like her. Let's face it, we'd mostly be out of jobs if it weren't for the clueless ones, so when I get clueless-but-nice, I appreciate it.