The Great Deletion Disaster of 2011

A couple of weeks ago, our office faced an enormous crisis. Somebody discovered that all of our important files and documents on our file server had disappeared. We could scarcely believe that all our work, dating back to the 1980s had vanished. Surely it couldn't be true. We did know that our IT people supposedly created regular backups and so it theoretically could have been possible to restore our files, but when someone accidentally deleted all our files several years ago, we discovered that their backups were far from complete, and we only survived thanks to having saved our crucial files to CD and DVD. Anyway, back to the present day and we suspected sabotage because surely nobody could have accidentally removed so much of our work. Perhaps a disgruntled former employee had wreaked vengeance?

The mystery was solved when someone discovered all the files and folders had been moved inside another folder. Obviously someone had accidentally dragged and dropped everything totally obliviously. Examining the details of the copied folders revealed the name of the culprit, someone who had been claiming they were not involved. We didn't want to announce the identity, but we did have a chuckle.

The moral of this story is that crucial files and folders must be made "read only", to prevent accidental catastrophes such as this one.