Pilot fish is working at the help desk of a managed service provider when a call comes in from one very angry user.

“She was complaining about people changing files on her computer and how she had lost weeks of work and everything was our fault and it was better when she was a local admin and did her own IT, and threw in a few threats about the contract and my employment,” says fish.

“After being belittled and abused for 10 minutes, I got her to explain that a critical Excel file that she uses daily had lost all its data — it was empty, but the file still existed.

“I sent her all the backups, shadow copies, snapshots and office temp files that I had to offer. After reviewing them, she told me that too much data had been lost for that file to be usable — even through the modification dates matched the date when she last updated the file.

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