This post is not meant to poke fun at the person in my company who works in mysterious ways (no I'm not referring to God).
I made the mistake of doing maintenance on our PCs and came across a problem. It seems that a person in my company stores relevant documents in the Recycle Bin. The problem was that I had erased the actual work this person was doing for the last x minutes/hours/days/weeks. I tried to do the right thing and use a NTFS file restorer to bring back those files I so graciously deleted but to no avail. I think you can't restore files from there initially, I would have had to guess where this person originally stored their files (good luck).
Basically put, they're screwed now out of x amount of work because I did the right thing and cleaned out their Recycle Bin.
This problem has actually spawned more work for me. I get to draw up documentation on how to properly store files and the processes we go through to store said files in both SalesLogix and on the server which get backed up nightly. The alternative is that people are storing documents on their machine initially which gets backed up roughly once every 2 months or less. I would think that it would be more beneficial to store the important documents where they will get backed up the most frequently. It's virtually impossible to tell where people store their files and try to build some kind of backup system for their PCs. Some use My Documents, some use folders underneath that, and some use their Desktop to store the more crucial files and information. Since I can't be everywhere at once, I need to instruct users on the systems we have in place for certain problems such as these.
I've not conducted audits on other machines to see how widespread this “problem” is. If I'm lucky, it's only the one person doing this. If I'm unlucky, this person has been telling everyone how “quick and easy” grouping files via the Recycle Bin can be. I'll update the post with my findings across the network as I'm doing maintenance later this evening. If it's widespread I get the fun job of slapping everyone's hand and telling them NO.
People wonder why I'm starting to dislike my job but I don't think they'll need many more examples like this.