As someone who has almost done the exact same thing in your position i said “just ask” as soon as you said “just ask.” Learned that lesson once and have retained it since lol!
i also do amateur tech support and when the device is in front of me alone, as a hard rule for if i'm going to delete ANYTHING i boot it on a live image USB and full clone the boot drive to a file on external storage using dd, then verify the backup isn't corrupted by taking the checksum of both the block device and the file, only THEN I boot the client's drive and proceed to delete however it's true i don't do this if I don't feel the need to delete anything and I don't do this if the client is also right in front of me or if it's over the phone, so i can immediately ask them about the data and figure out if they need to preserve it. maybe someday i will get burned by not "enforcing" a backup policy on clients, before i start any work for them.
Once, I had a PC Repair customer... System was slow, bloated with malware from LimeWire, and a VERY sketchy payload of files from "Zoosk." I cleared the weird files out, mostly at the behest of the Antivirus I choose to run (used MalWareBytes for low level threats, then activate free Avast install and run again for deep level). He complained that he didn't have photos and stuff he had wanted. Had to tell a 55+ year old that "Zoosk" online dating service had been one of the main Virus attack vectors on his system ... And he blatantly told me he'd install it again, because he loves the womenz on it. At that, I washed my hands, and decided he needed no further help
The moment you said what you did, I knew exactly how badly you messed up. That really is THE WORST mistake anyone in tech support can make. It really is quite rare that deleting something you assume to be unimportant doesn't backfire catastrophically.
In my previous job a college deleted all files from trash at a client, turned out they used that as a general company archiving tool 😂 Lost a lot of important data that day
@@samuvisser I learned this too. So I now make a backup of all trashfiles, empty it and ask. When they turn white, I show them the backup and ask why they work in this manner. Often, they got no clue about folders, save where ever they can (and thus mydocuments is a mess) and recent OneDrive sync causes many of them with weird questions why windows claims they are out of storage (15gb free) on their 1TB laptop ssd (and bought a 2tb external drive and wonder why files don't save on it... Well, maybe because you still trying to save to your mydocuments folder instead of the external drive) They stupid. Assume the worst, and then some more.
The average person doesn't know that factory resets and repairs wipes devices. They always assume that what's in their computer is going to remain in their computer. That's why backups even if the other person says nothing is super important.
Working with IT stuff, I have had many very similar “onosecond” moments. One time, during my first week of being on the new database system team at work, I accidentally replaced the OCR field of an entire document database with blanks. Wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the fact that it was for 7 *million* documents. Fortunately it didn’t touch the fields we had populated from the week’s doc review and didn’t affect the search index, so it was just a quick append-to-field from the last backup to remedy it, but if it was any other field I would have destroyed *hundreds* of manhours’ worth of work.
@@internetcancer1672 Because our backup schedule was established for once a week for review fields since it was a new system and we had to manually take the database offline to do it before we had our automated backup schedule in place, and since we’re a relatively small company, the number of fields populated after the week *was* small so it wouldn’t have been that much *writing* work to replace it, but that still represented hundreds of manhours of review that would have had to have been gone back through and reconstructed needlessly. Being part of the “establishing new protocols” team is dangerous work 🤣
all it would take is for those hundreds of manhours wiped to cause companies to lose billions of dollars in less than a second, IT people have the most pressure out of literally anyone half the time
Fairy Tales more like... This didn't happen. Same way as his school didn't get him to leave class to do a technicians job unless he went to school in the 70s. Or he went to the worlds smallest and worst funded school... I grew up in a hamlet and went to a school in a village and even we had a technician. My mate at school would go on to write the software used to virtually test compounds and designs for Federal Mogul (Ferodo: they make the breaks for f1 cars) at the age of 17 and he never had that happen. I myself could make games for the Amiga at the age of 6 and I didn't get taken out of classes just to fix sound... LOL. I mean I even taught fellow classmates how to get access to the servers running the network. As well as teaching everyone how to get into spyhunter and flight sim through excel. (Dev Hunter I believe it was actually called!) and to get the 8 ball in MS Access. I am sorry but if he were that good with computers he wouldn't have wiped stuff without asking or making a back up. Thats like someone claiming they are so good with baking that at school they used to get him to make desert for dinner! But then that they had no idea raw egg could cause salmonella.
The "rm -rf" route is dangerous. Fell into that trap too before albeit not in situations where I had to backup someone else's machine. That said, it's nice how honest you are with that story.
Was extracting .deb files, i was typing "sudo rm -rf ./usr" in my downloads directory in my chromebook and I think I may accidently typed it like "sudo rm -rf /usr", Deleted em files, turned off my chromebook. And wala, it said chrome OS is damaged or missing.
As someone who used to work as a technician for a long time; this story hits really close to home. It's painful how many mistakes can be made when we all just follow a flow; instead of taking steps to verify if what you're doing is the best way to do it in that scenario. Data recovery always gives me nightmares... perform a full disc image before you start working on a drive your recovering data from if ya can!
Damn, hearing about things like that hurts almost as much as living similar experiences. I was also a fix the computer guy when I was in primary school and when you're like 10 ditching a lesson to help a teacher sort out a projector or some shit for an assembly makes you feel like a level 1000 mafia boss. 😂 I do actually have a successful un-deleting story from my teenage years. A friend of mine is a musician and music teacher, he used to keep all of his projects on an mac formatted external hard drive. One day he let one of his students save a project to it, but the drive wouldn't open when connected, so the student went into disk utility to initialize the drive with him not knowing quite what that means. When he saw his drive show up as empty he called me straight away and I swiftly told him to unplug it and do not write to it. He told me it had almost exactly 400GBs worth of files on and it was gone in seconds, so I heavily suspected the data was still there, he was freaked out nonetheless. I searched the web for the best reviewed file recovery software and quickly headed to TPB to find a cracked version. He brought me the drive and a second blank drive I asked him to get to dump the several thousand now unnamed files on to, left my Macbook at it for almost 3 whole days, and by the end the second hard drive had just over 400GBs of files on it, I checked loads of video files and found no corruption, everything was back and in-tact. He then dedicated many weeks worth of evenings re-indexing all of the files and called me in absolute elation to say he had just found all the files he was the most interested in out of the whole lot, the last songs he recorded with his dad before he passed away.
We need more MattKC storytime! I have my own story sort of relevant. I was writing a script for a personal project to pull data from specific larger graphs in the DB into their own databases since it was getting a little absurd, and I went to go test it, put in what I thought was the testing credentials and ran the script. Turns out I wasn't paying much attention and accidentally put in the URL and credentials for the production database. The script did not work right and ended up failing to properly read the data and then wrote blank data to the new db, and then deleting everything on the old DB... oops
I am so careful with things like this, for this exact reason. What might be a completely routine clearing of space could be detrimental to another persons entire workflow so if im messing with someone elses files I dont delete anything I havent created myself
l am so careful with things like this, for this exact reason. What might be a completely routine clearing of space could be detrimental to another persons entire workflow so if im messing with someone elses files l dont delete anything l havent created myself
@@Theunicorn2012 l am so careful with things like this, for this exact reason. What might be a completely routine clearing of space could be detrimental to another persons entire workflow so if im messing with someone elses files l dont delete anything l havent created myself
As a person who does repairs and restores for a living, this is my worst nightmare. I've had a similar incident to this once and I felt so bad! I always make a backup of anything i want to try deleting now, when possible.
As a person who does repairs and restores for a living, this is my worst nightmare. I've had a similar incident to this once and I felt so bad! I always make a backup of anything i want to try deleting now, when possible.
i almost made the same mistake on a friends PC some time ago. all his personal stuff was on it. the boot was incredibly slow (thanks, windows) and would barely boot. there was no sufficient storage devices to move anything around to, so i actually went down to a close by store and bought an ssd to solve this issue. told him to just cover the price of the ssd and a little more (it was around $57 so he gave me $60). when i was setting up the new Windows installation my paranoid side started telling me that i might have selected his personal drive for formatting. luckily i had double checked and made backups prior. one was to keep all storage on an SSD and the other was a third copy of his photos on a flash drive. although nothing had been touched i was glad i had kept such safety in mind. i myself have lost so many personal projects, files, bookmarks, passwords, rare albums, you name it honestly.. to mishandling data and not making double backups. so it really make sure to go crazy to preserve things now, and with *NIX systems it's been very simple to do so. morale of this story is.. do not, under any circumstances, touch people's data in any way. treat it like radiation, like seeing it will make you go blind or that touching/tampering with it could make you sick. completely section it off from everything else and keep it in a box somewhere for someone else to handle later. i'm unsure if you've gone through courses for any sort of IT work but this is an incredible cost that came at the loss of others time and memories. mistakes like these are why people are sketched out to hire anyone to do any sort of work and always blame the computer guy for "what did you do? well it was working fine before? you broke it!". years of dealing with this from my parents made me very hesitant with people's things out the gate. so hopefully you learned from your story here and can move on to help others.
This is exactly the reason why when I was working computer repair the store had a policy that whenever we needed to "handle" data(remove, copy, etc) we would have the customer sign a data handling sheet which states all of the obvious dangers and functions as a extra check during the intake. This prevented more situations than we'd like to admit. Even though no one liked having the customer sign the paper :)
After working in repair shops (computers and cellphones) it NEVER occured to me to create a policy like this and make the customer sign a sheet like that :(
A channel sub-section called MattF'sUp showing mistakes every now and then is something I'd totally love to watch. Gives an opportunity to raise awareness of certain issues and also to be informative. Great video!
This and the "failed projects" video were honestly really insightful. I'd love to hear more stories like that - I think seeing things go wrong every once in a while is far more valuable to learning than just seeing everything that goes right.
This and the "failed projects" video were honestly really insightful. I'd love to hear more stories like that - I think seeing things go wrong every once in a while is far more valuable to learning than just seeing everything that goes right.
As someone who also does computer work for friends, I now always image their drive before doing any work purely as a precaution, as there will always be something I miss. It's saved me once in so far and that is once too many for me!
This is the way. Disk imaging is the coolest thing ever, I don't know why stock android phones don't support making them for identical models (IE a full disk image from an SM-G973 that only works with a G973 because that's how the system data in the image is configured).
As someone who also does computer work for friends, l now always image their drive before doing any work purely as a precaution, as there will always be something l miss. It's saved me once in so far and that is once too many for me!
I’ve had so many similar things happen yo me that I ALWAYS try to explain to people what I’m doing before I do it. It’s a pain and it can confuse them, but there was one situation where an alarm bell went off in the person’s head (like it could’ve done for you), so I never stopped. Loved the video, thank you so much for sharing as a PSA for everyone!
When you said you deleted her backups, I knew exactly where this was going. The realization in the moment and the amount of stress must've been insane.
I've done this multiple times, man. When you're troubleshooting and in the flow it's extremely annoying to have to ask people if they need this or that file, and then wait for them to answer. That's why I stopped being the "computer guy" and dropped the idea of fixing notebooks in college. It's simply not worth the hassle.
Yeah this has happened to me. I was helping someone fix a computer and I emptied their recycle bin and they used it as a folder for storing things. Never make assumptions when deleting files goes, no matter how daft it may seem.
I've worked for a company that did computer help at home for individuals. I've worked there for two years and went to hundreds of houses. I have made a mistake like this during my time with this company. I was just upfront about it and the customer wasn't thrilled, but wasn't upset either. The customer had a "oh well everyone makes mistakes" attitude and that was awesome. Question for you Matt: How upset was your friend? Was it a "my life is ruined" or was it similar to "oh well"? Somewhere in between? Keep up the good work. I really like your in-depth technical video's.
Some of the most important data was probably the photos, so I think that if she knew that those were okay, she would have been upset but not really mad
The first time I experimented with Ubuntu, I wiped my internal drive with a project I had been working on for 4 years(plus a bunch of other misc. stuff I collected in those years). A pretty bit hit, but nothing more than a "Well shit, I guess that's gone. Better get back to work." Not much could be done about it. Never experienced such data loss before, so I never even thought of backups then. These days are a bit different.
@@gen157 me too, but when i was reinstalling windows. i'm not exactly sure how this happened but it turns out the drive selector must have selected both the second hard drive and my ssd then i clicked "delete" (to delete the partitions) and when i saw both drives say "Unallocated Space" i was like "oh well, i guess that's gone now." i had many projects in premiere pro and visual studio on there too so that was a sad day but just thought to myself "oh well lol"
oh god this is relatable, I remember years ago when I was in high school getting asked to upgrade a friends computer to windows 98 and being like "yeah, I've done it a few times now" and assumed it would be the same as any other system I'd done the upgrade on turned out that the system had weird drivers for the internal modem that wouldn't install by default from the installation disks and I couldn't get online to get them so I left them with a computer that couldn't get online while I had to go and scour the internet for the drivers, which took about a week of searching every spare chance I got when I could get online, but my dad ran his business from home so I couldn't take up the phone line all the time with internet calls If I'd known I could have quickly downloaded the driver when windows was able to tell me what the modem was, and install after the installation
You just reminded me I used to have usb stick with drivers. It was all fine until I did a fresh install on pc with mobo that windows did not recognise usb by default
essentially this whole entire story was relatable. I too also was the kid that was pulled out of class to help the teachers, faded that away in high school, and also managed to delete the whole entire contents of the downloads folder on my cousins macbook while diagnosing a similar issue.
For me, my approach to situations like that is "Can I back this up NOW", usually with tools like CloneZilla (or in this case, DDing to an image or whatever) onto an external drive. This is something I do a lot with corrupted drives, where I practice on the image in a Unix environment, then apply the solution to the real device... unless that isn't needed and I can just use the image. That being said, yeah... with so many backups, I would have asked, since there could have been a bigger underlying issue. One thing I would have absolutely gone after, if at all possible because F-CK APPLE, is just removing app program data. Let's face it: downloading your apps again isn't exactly the worst thing in the world, just not the data for them (like settings and game progression). I've done it enough times to know what to ask and have also heard enough horror stories of "really intelligent people" using their recycle bins as a substitute for My Documents. But the part with being pulled out of class all the time... yeah, guilty as charged. Free child labor, FTW.
It can be very difficult at times to perfectly meet the needs of the person you are trying to help. I usually go as far as I can without having to ask them and then guide them through a cleanup. Honestly most of the time just deleting a bunch of programs helps more than anything else.
this entire video is a mood about these kind of things boosting your ego a bit, making you feel proud, and eventually you face a situation that puts you on checkmate or makes you fuck up without realizing at first. great story Matt, love u
this entire video is a mood about these kind of things boosting your ego a bit, making you feel proud, and eventually you face a situation that puts you on checkmate or makes you fuck up without realizing at first. great story Matt, love u
I learned this mistake early on with my personal drives years ago, since then I've always been paranoid about messing with other people's computers. Family computers are a straight-up no-go (phones included) for me cause their never happy and they expect me to be their personal tech guy.
A mistake is a mistake tho. Even if intentions were good we must always go ahead and own it when we accidently harm others. This could have been really major and it is really nice that he did not downplay the situation
bro, matt i feel the exact same way ive had the exact same experience. teachers would be so amazed sometimes they'd pull me out of lessons for their own benefit
I've had a very similar situation once. my girlfriend at the time wanted me to clean up her file system and I helped her through Anydesk while she watched. She had a lot of files of projects from university stored on both her desktop and her OneDrive and I told her that since she has a very small boot drive and her desktop was on the boot drive, that those files took up a lot of her driver's space. She needed some space on the boot drive anyway so it seemed like a good idea to delete them from the desktop since they were backed up anyway. Soooo.. i deleted them, and shortly after found out that OneDrive decided they should delete their copies too. The files were too large for them to be in the trash and at the time, i wasn't aware of any recovery tools that could save the file types she used. So yeah, this happened while she was looking at me doing it. That was painful for both me and her.
Always backup the device your working on, even if they say there's nothing important, because chances are they just expect everything to be there by default or be untouched like photos.
Had a new starter in the office make a similar mistake once with the CEO's Outlook data. I went to recover the deleted data, but because this new guy had already started setting up Outlook again, the data got overwritten before it could be recovered. The moral of the story? If you're working on someone's computer, bring a USB SSD so you can make a quick copy of whatever you're about to touch. Just in case.
I also used to get pulled out of class, often had half days just running around fixing stuff. They would let me do anything I wanted to and gave me study resources to make sure I kept decent grades in the rest of my curriculum. I got to learn to pull fiber, weld, and use and oscilloscope. They also gave me access to the library at all times so I could read whenever I wanted. This was for all of my schools. They also let me learn how to play 4 instruments. You should tell more stories, very interesting and relatable. Thanks for all your great content!
Due to a substantial data loss many years ago I been absolutely paranoid about it, I image my OS regularly and keep 3 copies of that image, two on other partitions (one a completely separate internal HDD as well as the 3rd copy on an external drive I put in a drawer for safe keeping. Important files / documents etc also keep two copies of backed up on a regular basis. I just refuse to go through what I did before and learned a hard lesson.
I work with computer repair. The amount of clients who come to me saying "yeah you can format it, there's nothing important" and later come crying because there actually was important data there is ASTONISHING. That's why I always ask and make it clear that formatting is definitive and they will not get any data back.
I really enjoyed this! I won't get too personal but I went through an issue at work that I was really beating myself up over, getting home and watching this reminded me that I'm not along in my screw ups among other things. So thanks Matt, I look foward to more story time kinda videos in the future, keep up the great work!
Two ways to not delete that data one is to only delete the oldest ones if you think that they are safe to delete and two is to transfer them to another hard drive. Never know when you're going to need that data.
I feel for you Matt... I had a similar-ish situation many years ago, where I decided it would be a great idea to merge 2 drive partitions into 1... with the data still on there... without a backup. It was not a great idea... the program I was using crashed, messed the drive up and I lost a whole load of data. Luckily it was my own data (if you can call that lucky!), but I felt so stupid afterwards! These things teach us valuable lessons... now whenever I'm doing work on my PC or someone else's PC I will ALWAYS make backups every step of the way
I've actually had an opposite experience with some of my mom's files. One day she booted up her computer and all of the files on her portable hard drive were just gone. Like, windows just decided to randomly delete everything. She did not do this herself, of course lmfao. I pretty much instructed her to literally not touch anything and keep the computer on while I did some research, incase anything was stored only in RAM. Luckily, it wasn't, and all of the files where still in a temp folder of some sort. Only a few files were corrupted and using WinDirStat and the explorer I was able to save several hundred gigs of stuff from being reduced to ashes. That was a good day for my ego >:)
I have of course made some bad mistakes before too. (Not with other people's things, luckily!) I almost bricked my own phone by trying to root it and put a new operating system on it. It would pretty much refuse to launch with all sorts of erros, and I was relegated to using an S3 with an awful battery that was 8 years old by that point, in order to still be able to communicate with my parents (I was in high school at the time) I was able to re-install the original OS, but no rooting or new OS's for that LG V20 lmao
@@reptarien I installed custom Android OS and then locked the boot loader cuz phone showed that warning in yellow text on boot-up. It got bricked and company was asking to replace whole motherboard. Later searched a telegram group. Found people who were probably service centre workers who can unlock boot loader with their company tools (req employee code to work). It got fixed, Had good relief.
That brings memories back ;) Lost a bunch of manga that way back in the day, rm -rf is relentless when you just oh simply forget to change the folder which has to be rfminusrf'ed. Wasn't me but the data was mine 😬 I did enjoy the video :) Love your storytelling.
This reminds me of a situation where my mate had a usb flash drive that was playing up, wasn’t showing the correct partition size or something. So I thought okay I’ll wipe it via diskpart. Accidentally selected disk 1 instead of 2 and wiped his secondary HDD :) , lost all his games and photos etc. About 6 months later I accidentally done the same thing on my own computer, only that time I thought to pirate a copy of some recovery software and actually recover my games etc
I have an external harddrive with like 10 partitions that i'm CONSTANTLY installing Linux distros on, and I have this eternal fear of deleting the one partition with essentially everything on it.
ive done this before omg NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO THE PAIN i got bored and i had my windows usb on me so i decided to go round school and format all the laptops and i opened up diskpart and then typed 0 instead of 1 and it formatted my usb drive, so i had to put windows back on it with rufus when i got home lol this was because 0 (as you'd expect) should be the SSD/HDD inside the computer as the BIOS puts that in front of everything else. just that this time it was not :)
Learning the hard way sucks, but I guarantee you never made that same mistake again. I've always said behind every great software engineer is a massive production outage, database loss, etc that should have been prevented. Making mistakes is how we learn. I hope you share more stories like this so people can normalize making mistakes instead of feeling ashamed of them!
Thank you for sharing that cringe-inducing memory :) I've had troubles with storage space and data loss on mac before so this hit me with crazy second-hand stress lol
It's an interesting phenomenon at play here. It's easy to look back and say "I should have..." or "I screwed up..." but honestly, you just had THE best lesson in how to avoid pain when doing user support, and I doubt you would have learned it as well as you did if someone had just told you the things you told us. Whenever someone trusts another person to do any sort of work like this, the helper risks doing undesirable things. This applies as much to builders as it does to technical support people as it does to surgeons. Working in any discipline means discovering that fine line between doing things because you know they are right and stopping to obtain consent.
I really enjoyed this video, and all of the comments from people with similar stories, so I'll add mine: Back in the DOS days, I mistook a directory name that seemed to be just a random set of letters for "oh, just a temporary folder that obviously can be deleted to get back space". It turned out to be full of AutoCAD files that represented all of the engineer's projects EVER, and the random set of letters had deep significance to HIM. I was never invited back to work at that organization again, so I don't know if they had backups or not.
Ez, just have a brain fart for a second. I did that mistake with personal data so many times I always ask in advance if I have to handle someone else's stuff.
If you're trying to say "I would never make a mistake like this! Matt must be such a goober!" then I'm sorry to say you could definitely make a mistake like this. You are not immune to gooberhood.
I am so overprotective about my files i would never even dare to think about deleting even one bit of data of someone else without having asked the person at least 2 times explaining in much detail what i am about to delete
I think when I did something like this, I learned how to restore deleted files as well. Somehow managed it. Also, since then, definitely asked my buddies who wanted HDD/SSD upgrades if they still needed their files and OSes, almost always bought a $10 HDD enclosure for them to do what they wanted with their files after the fact.
Best story I have is when I was tasked with re-partitioning a friend's drive. There was a useless partition taking up a lot of space, or something like that, but I couldn't just erase it and get that extra space immediately, so I went ahead and copied all the files to one of my drives. This let me reformat the original drive and claim that free space. It was all great in theory until I found that the drive I copied the data to was dead. And I found out _after_ formatting the original data. I'm sure the warning signs were there in the SMART values, but to me it seemed like the drive died in minutes. Thankfully I managed to undelete almost everything on the original drive.
That's my worst data nightmare and the reason I have three backup drives: needing a drive and realizing it's dead. My parents had video of my sister's wedding on DVD and pulled it out at their 12th anniversary. Can you guess what happens to a lot of 12 year old home burned DVDs? They SPOIL.
From my own experience, I had one of my friend's parents keep all their important files in Windows in the Recycle bin, because somebody told them they take up less space that way. They weren't happy when I emptied the recycle bin on autopilot while deleting something else from the computer.
I can't believe there are people out there that actually use the recycle bin as storage, that's just asking for trouble. You wouldn't put physical documents into an actual bin for storage.
We all make this kind of mistake at least once. The important thing to remember is to always communicate, even if the user of the device doesn't understand anything. Communication, and how to translate informations in an understandable way for the user are key in fixing stuff. And the most important of all things to consider : In tech, we're all stupid. Something obvious for one, might not be for the other.
I was the underage IT guy at my school, I lost count of the number of times I had to push CTRL+ALT+UP to turn someone's screen the right way up. Luckily there was no "oops I nuked someone's phone data" moment.
This actually happened to me last month. My hard drive just broke itself somehow, so I asked the school teacher if I could borrow one from the school - they had just bought new computers and they were all fresh installs. He and the headmistress allowed me to - considering that I was the one who setup the previous computers - but didn't told me that the 128GB solid-state drive they gave me had a Windows 10 Enterprise installation with a password for the offline profile, and somehow, password restoration was turned off. I figured; this is a fresh install, I'll just do it again! So I installed Windows 7 Starter (the only Windows disc I own) and used that SSD until I could buy my own. Then I returned it and asked for the Win10 Enterprise disc to reinstall it. It worked, but later that week I found out that some other teachers had files on that SSD! They gave me specifically the SSD that Mr. Math Teacher used to backup all the other - now decommissioned - HDs. And I had just wiped out everything. Turns out, all the teachers had everything from that drive on actual, paper documents, but they had lost a bunch of essays from students and some other grade-related docs that were digital-only. Now the teachers hate me, but since all the students had to give the same essays again, they all knew the right answers, so they all got maximum grade and love me. But I'm still single, though.
That is in no way your fault. If that drive was so important, it should never have been allowed out of the admin office, Let alone lent to someone, further still, lent to someone to use as a system disk... Why that drive was just kicking around like it was just some common scratch disk or general spare drive is a severe case of miss management by the school's administration. The fact they also do not have some form of automatic backup system is also beyond me. a small NAS box in the admin office would not cost very much, even on a poorly funded public-school budget.
@@pseudonymity0000 Yeah. I just fear this kind of stuff is kinda local. I took part on a painting competition (also last month) with 24 others and they just piled up all the paintings like books - piling up paintings is basically piling up thousand-dollar CDs. Also, I finished ninth. But I can't help myself but agree with you. The school used to have over thirty computers, and I had setup all of them with Windows 7 and drivers and Office after the Informatics teacher was fired. Why they just chose to return all those perfectly good HDs to the Brazilian government (laws for public sectors here; not using, return) before properly setting up the PCs is anyone's guess. And yeah, with 10 new computers and 10 new SSDs, they had to give the one in use to “the artist guy from the sticks”… Maybe I'm Jimmy Hopkins from Bully and someone in school is Garying me.
I'm reminded of this old quote; "The only mistakes are the ones you don't learn from. Unless they're fatal mistakes. In which case, at least others can learn from them."
I once had two files, one very old one and a newer copy just downloaded and already deleted on the server. I then wanted to delete the old one, accidentally clicked on the new one and pressed Shift+Delete, Enter. Gone. I couldn't restore it and had to redo everything based on the old one I still had. I didn't know about any undelete tools yet. And I once deleted 2TB of data important to me by accidentally formatting my external HDD instead of the USB I intended as a RaspberryPi boot medium...
Can relate to such a big mistake Earlier this month, I tried installing arch linux as a second partition on my laptop, but I tried shrinking my main partition... That did not go well, what happened is when I rebooted back into windows, because the install had failed, I just got a bluescreen I rebooted into winpe (from a USB drive I made on another computer) and found the C drive to just be a file, and a folder After some time, I found the C drive was the boot drive for some reason, but my main drive was the D drive In there, everything seemed fine, which was to be expected when it was only shrunk by 10gb After some time, I managed to get it to boot to a black screen, I went into winpe and replaced the Accessibility menu with cmd.exe and opened that up With this, I tried doing stuff such as opening explorer, or winlogon, but none worked, the first makes sense because it's a system level command prompt, not sure about the 2nd though Later, I replaced the Windows folder with an old backup of it, It worked as it it would log in, but other then that, nope After some time, I came to the realization that there was nothing that I could do to save the windows install, so I just backed up the install to a NAS, and reinstalled windows
@@keltrm yup, cfdisk doesnt resize the actual filesystem, so that was probably what happened, there's a linux tool to fix NTFS filesystems which helped me when i was in your situation once but i forgot the name
Can definitely relate. Got used to run git reset --hard in certain situations, and it was never a problem because, well, version control typically has your back (git reflog etc.), but then I ran the command and realized that I had not committed my changes at any point and just deleted the work of an entire day by accident. Luckily, the code editor had the previous file state in the undo history of at least one of the files that I worked on for a few hours.
YOOOOO, someone else who had this happen to them! We had a desktop surveillance program on the computers that conflicted with a big state testing program. Our IT lady called me out of class for assistance, handed me a USB drive and said "Get to formatting, we need this tomorrow". Got me the schools WiFi code and gave me unlimited power over the classes.
Imagine listening to this story and thinking this dude was the one that fucked up and not the idiot who made so many backups that it bricked her macbook and also decided to wipe her phone for good measure
8 or so year old me figured out what "Format" actually means... by doing that on the camera used for my mom's wedding photos 💀 Was good foreshadowing however cause 10 or so years later they'd divorce again anyways.
0:55 running minecraft servers and pirating adobe software are basically all I do. IMO, Adobe software is perfectly okay to pirate, because it's way too expensive, and the company probably gets enough money from businesses alone to keep running, so you're not harming anyone.
@@Xnoob545 I suggested Omega notation from Yet Another Merge Game for Particle incremental, and more people probably use it in YAMG than 1.5 (which is impossible unless the second one is Embi) people, I'm guessing around a few hundred
I have a client that complained about automatic cleaning of Thunderbird recycle bin. She claimed that she uses the garbage to store important emails… yep, I feel you bro
i was the same in school any teacher or student that needed computer help always asked me. in primary school there was only one IT assistant but she would always be teaching so i would be the only person around.
Almost the same thing has happened to me at my first workplace. My colleague was complaining about her computer being slow. It was an average Windows PC, which needed a fresh installation of the OS. I explained the situation to her, and asked if she has a backup copy of all the important data, mostly the accounting and invoicing software and its data. She said of course she does. So I wiped the hard drive, installed Windows, drivers, and other software, including the accounting and invoicing software. I asked her for the backup USB flash disk. She said: "I thought you did a backup". Of course, undelete software didn't help. I got almost fired for this, so since then even if someone says they have a backup, I just make one anyway.
The moment you said there were 20 or so backups, I just thought "Well, if you still have contact you can just ask. If you're not going to do that just delete one or two." Then you deleted all of them and my heart sank.
I did the same thing to my own mac. Did a format thinking that my time machine had backed up everything. Turns out it had been failing to backup for months. One positive from this situation is that you will remember to backup everything before deleting.
My great mistake was around 2016, when I had this WD Elements enclosure with 3tb drive and I just (at that time) bought WD Blue 6TB hard drive so, I thought on upgrading my external hard drive enclosure - it worked fine for 3 days but after that files were starting to corrupt and such, so I took out 6TB drive and inserted original WD Green 3TB drive back to it. That's when the nightmare started - it didn't work, and that drive had my documents, photos and so on gathered since 2013 to 2016... took it out, connected to a pc without enclosure (since it was sata based drive) - same thing it was detected by the pc but, had to be formatted with no other way (I had no knowledge about partitions and such back then) so I did that and in frustration decided to pay 60usd for EaseUS licence so that I could deep scan the drive (which took 8 hours) anbd recover 1.8TB of data (which took 16 hours) 99.9% of it recovered fine with that 0.1% of some pictures/wallpapers being glitchy. I threw away that WD Elements enclosure and decided not to use any proprietary company enclosure with only 3rd party external enclosures. Later find out that WD's enclosure had an 8 pin chip which would lock the drive if you inserted another drive in to enclosure or something like that... same WD Green 3TB drive works fine to this day on generic external enclosure.
I can relate to your history; I was also 'computer kid' in school and have carried forward the offer of help for technical issues. When it comes to badly-broken-computer repair, I tell people that my strategy will likely destroy all the data on the machine up front. That has helped to separate the "I need this machine" from the "I need this data" requests.
Pretty relatable. I've accidentally deleted files without noticing that they contained photos and videos that I cherish, and I haven't able to bring myself out to help someone with their computer problems in GENERAL as of now.
"The biggest mistake I ever made..." Take it from me, you are young, this will NOT be the biggest mistake you ever make, plenty of time for that one my man!
It's bad enough when you do this to yourself.... So yeah a very important lesson. These are sometimes difficult questions that definitely spook me out. There's so much implicit responsibility and trust when somebody gives their device to you. Even for something trivial. But the absolute worst is when something goes wrong and you don't know of it's something you did or completely unrelated.
Well this is also a lesson for her, although it wasn't exactly her fault, you obviously shouldn't store backups on your OS drive, if you make backups for anything it needs to be on a secondary drive, an external drive, a NAS and/or cloud backup, and don't rely on just one of those things.
@@Saber_Nico You probably won't lose anything important like pictures, but Android's backups are still far worse than Apple's, I've never had a good experience restoring or getting a new phone, a fair number of apps won't keep their data, especially games if they don't use Google's cloud saves or their own cloud sever, so actually unless you have a rooted phone Android is actually WORSE at backups because it's rare to have a local backup of anything aside from personal media, making you even more reliant on Google's cloud if you want to keep stuff like game saves and while it isn't entirely their fault because everyone wants their own launcher, you will have to spend an hour or two swapping icons around getting your phone in order again... I'm not a fan of Apple but credit where it's due, one of the few things Apple really does rather well are backups and device interchangeability between other Apple devices.
As someone who has almost done the exact same thing in your position i said “just ask” as soon as you said “just ask.” Learned that lesson once and have retained it since lol!
Same, literally the same.
i also do amateur tech support and when the device is in front of me alone, as a hard rule for if i'm going to delete ANYTHING i boot it on a live image USB and full clone the boot drive to a file on external storage using dd, then verify the backup isn't corrupted by taking the checksum of both the block device and the file, only THEN I boot the client's drive and proceed to delete
however it's true i don't do this if I don't feel the need to delete anything and I don't do this if the client is also right in front of me or if it's over the phone, so i can immediately ask them about the data and figure out if they need to preserve it. maybe someday i will get burned by not "enforcing" a backup policy on clients, before i start any work for them.
Once, I had a PC Repair customer... System was slow, bloated with malware from LimeWire, and a VERY sketchy payload of files from "Zoosk." I cleared the weird files out, mostly at the behest of the Antivirus I choose to run (used MalWareBytes for low level threats, then activate free Avast install and run again for deep level).
He complained that he didn't have photos and stuff he had wanted.
Had to tell a 55+ year old that "Zoosk" online dating service had been one of the main Virus attack vectors on his system ... And he blatantly told me he'd install it again, because he loves the womenz on it. At that, I washed my hands, and decided he needed no further help
Same, same, same.
what'd you remove?
Kids, just remember that pirating Adobe software is morally correct.
and nintendo games
FRR- if the US government is against the pricing of adobe software- def morally correct >:)
@@brunocamposquenaoeoyoutuber You and the one yoi replied to are correct
The moment you said what you did, I knew exactly how badly you messed up. That really is THE WORST mistake anyone in tech support can make. It really is quite rare that deleting something you assume to be unimportant doesn't backfire catastrophically.
In my previous job a college deleted all files from trash at a client, turned out they used that as a general company archiving tool 😂 Lost a lot of important data that day
@@samuvisser I learned this too. So I now make a backup of all trashfiles, empty it and ask. When they turn white, I show them the backup and ask why they work in this manner. Often, they got no clue about folders, save where ever they can (and thus mydocuments is a mess) and recent OneDrive sync causes many of them with weird questions why windows claims they are out of storage (15gb free) on their 1TB laptop ssd (and bought a 2tb external drive and wonder why files don't save on it... Well, maybe because you still trying to save to your mydocuments folder instead of the external drive)
They stupid. Assume the worst, and then some more.
The only route i would have gone is clearing something like a browser cache or moving the files
@@samuvisser terrible place to keep archives lol
The average person doesn't know that factory resets and repairs wipes devices. They always assume that what's in their computer is going to remain in their computer. That's why backups even if the other person says nothing is super important.
Working with IT stuff, I have had many very similar “onosecond” moments. One time, during my first week of being on the new database system team at work, I accidentally replaced the OCR field of an entire document database with blanks. Wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the fact that it was for 7 *million* documents. Fortunately it didn’t touch the fields we had populated from the week’s doc review and didn’t affect the search index, so it was just a quick append-to-field from the last backup to remedy it, but if it was any other field I would have destroyed *hundreds* of manhours’ worth of work.
how is it even possible to destroy hundreds of hours worth of work? Why couldn't the other fields be restored from back up?
@@internetcancer1672 Because our backup schedule was established for once a week for review fields since it was a new system and we had to manually take the database offline to do it before we had our automated backup schedule in place, and since we’re a relatively small company, the number of fields populated after the week *was* small so it wouldn’t have been that much *writing* work to replace it, but that still represented hundreds of manhours of review that would have had to have been gone back through and reconstructed needlessly. Being part of the “establishing new protocols” team is dangerous work 🤣
@@grex2595 heh, oh yea, I never miss a Tom Scott video and I deeply sympathized with him that day 🤣😅
all it would take is for those hundreds of manhours wiped to cause companies to lose billions of dollars in less than a second, IT people have the most pressure out of literally anyone half the time
@@cheeseisgreat24”content” is probably a trigger word for him after that incident.
Tbh, you should make more MattKC stories. I bet many people can agree with this.
It sounds like you are asking Matt to fabricate stories for our entertainment
And another song!
Yes but label it as lessons from mattkc or something, thought this videos content was going to be different based on the title
Fairy Tales more like... This didn't happen. Same way as his school didn't get him to leave class to do a technicians job unless he went to school in the 70s. Or he went to the worlds smallest and worst funded school... I grew up in a hamlet and went to a school in a village and even we had a technician. My mate at school would go on to write the software used to virtually test compounds and designs for Federal Mogul (Ferodo: they make the breaks for f1 cars) at the age of 17 and he never had that happen. I myself could make games for the Amiga at the age of 6 and I didn't get taken out of classes just to fix sound... LOL. I mean I even taught fellow classmates how to get access to the servers running the network. As well as teaching everyone how to get into spyhunter and flight sim through excel. (Dev Hunter I believe it was actually called!) and to get the 8 ball in MS Access.
I am sorry but if he were that good with computers he wouldn't have wiped stuff without asking or making a back up. Thats like someone claiming they are so good with baking that at school they used to get him to make desert for dinner! But then that they had no idea raw egg could cause salmonella.
@@razerow3391 you only went to your school, how would you know every school? also he’s sharing a valuable lesson.
If there is one thing, I have learned as a programmer, its to never just delete, always move and wait for someone to ask for the moved file
the good ol' scream test
The "rm -rf" route is dangerous.
Fell into that trap too before albeit not in situations where I had to backup someone else's machine.
That said, it's nice how honest you are with that story.
Nothing is deleted till new data has been overwritten
I think that's also how Toy Story 2 almost got deleted
Was extracting .deb files, i was typing "sudo rm -rf ./usr" in my downloads directory in my chromebook and I think I may accidently typed it like "sudo rm -rf /usr", Deleted em files, turned off my chromebook. And wala, it said chrome OS is damaged or missing.
Never forget to Do rm -rf / --no-preserve-root
@@toyotaae86trueno Not so funny if you suddenly type in those commands but yea.
As someone who used to work as a technician for a long time; this story hits really close to home. It's painful how many mistakes can be made when we all just follow a flow; instead of taking steps to verify if what you're doing is the best way to do it in that scenario.
Data recovery always gives me nightmares... perform a full disc image before you start working on a drive your recovering data from if ya can!
the sweet sensation of sweating bullets while you're hyperthreading in your mind after realizing what you've done. it all happens in a nanosecond
the onosecond
@@notalostnumber8660 Ah, yes, Tom Scott.
pure dread on that moment
@@notalostnumber8660 dammit, beat me to it
"...while you're hyperthreading in your mind" I'm gonna use this phrase from now on.
Damn, hearing about things like that hurts almost as much as living similar experiences.
I was also a fix the computer guy when I was in primary school and when you're like 10 ditching a lesson to help a teacher sort out a projector or some shit for an assembly makes you feel like a level 1000 mafia boss. 😂
I do actually have a successful un-deleting story from my teenage years.
A friend of mine is a musician and music teacher, he used to keep all of his projects on an mac formatted external hard drive. One day he let one of his students save a project to it, but the drive wouldn't open when connected, so the student went into disk utility to initialize the drive with him not knowing quite what that means.
When he saw his drive show up as empty he called me straight away and I swiftly told him to unplug it and do not write to it. He told me it had almost exactly 400GBs worth of files on and it was gone in seconds, so I heavily suspected the data was still there, he was freaked out nonetheless. I searched the web for the best reviewed file recovery software and quickly headed to TPB to find a cracked version.
He brought me the drive and a second blank drive I asked him to get to dump the several thousand now unnamed files on to, left my Macbook at it for almost 3 whole days, and by the end the second hard drive had just over 400GBs of files on it, I checked loads of video files and found no corruption, everything was back and in-tact.
He then dedicated many weeks worth of evenings re-indexing all of the files and called me in absolute elation to say he had just found all the files he was the most interested in out of the whole lot, the last songs he recorded with his dad before he passed away.
I love the happy ending.
We need more MattKC storytime!
I have my own story sort of relevant. I was writing a script for a personal project to pull data from specific larger graphs in the DB into their own databases since it was getting a little absurd, and I went to go test it, put in what I thought was the testing credentials and ran the script. Turns out I wasn't paying much attention and accidentally put in the URL and credentials for the production database. The script did not work right and ended up failing to properly read the data and then wrote blank data to the new db, and then deleting everything on the old DB... oops
Hopefully someone hadn't just deleted your backups!
ouch
Hopefully they had off-grid, tape backups 😅
I am so careful with things like this, for this exact reason. What might be a completely routine clearing of space could be detrimental to another persons entire workflow
so if im messing with someone elses files I dont delete anything I havent created myself
l am so careful with things like this, for this exact reason. What might be a completely routine clearing of space could be detrimental to another persons entire workflow so if im messing with someone elses files l dont delete anything l havent created myself
@@Theunicorn2012 l am so careful with things like this, for this exact reason. What might be a completely routine clearing of space could be detrimental to another persons entire workflow so if im messing with someone elses files l dont delete anything l havent created myself
As a person who does repairs and restores for a living, this is my worst nightmare. I've had a similar incident to this once and I felt so bad! I always make a backup of anything i want to try deleting now, when possible.
As a person who does repairs and restores for a living, this is my worst nightmare. I've had a similar incident to this once and I felt so bad! I always make a backup of anything i want to try deleting now, when possible.
It appears this guy tried to delete his own comment but made a backup of it instead.
i almost made the same mistake on a friends PC some time ago. all his personal stuff was on it. the boot was incredibly slow (thanks, windows) and would barely boot. there was no sufficient storage devices to move anything around to, so i actually went down to a close by store and bought an ssd to solve this issue. told him to just cover the price of the ssd and a little more (it was around $57 so he gave me $60).
when i was setting up the new Windows installation my paranoid side started telling me that i might have selected his personal drive for formatting. luckily i had double checked and made backups prior. one was to keep all storage on an SSD and the other was a third copy of his photos on a flash drive. although nothing had been touched i was glad i had kept such safety in mind.
i myself have lost so many personal projects, files, bookmarks, passwords, rare albums, you name it honestly.. to mishandling data and not making double backups. so it really make sure to go crazy to preserve things now, and with *NIX systems it's been very simple to do so.
morale of this story is.. do not, under any circumstances, touch people's data in any way. treat it like radiation, like seeing it will make you go blind or that touching/tampering with it could make you sick. completely section it off from everything else and keep it in a box somewhere for someone else to handle later. i'm unsure if you've gone through courses for any sort of IT work but this is an incredible cost that came at the loss of others time and memories. mistakes like these are why people are sketched out to hire anyone to do any sort of work and always blame the computer guy for "what did you do? well it was working fine before? you broke it!". years of dealing with this from my parents made me very hesitant with people's things out the gate. so hopefully you learned from your story here and can move on to help others.
This is exactly the reason why when I was working computer repair the store had a policy that whenever we needed to "handle" data(remove, copy, etc) we would have the customer sign a data handling sheet which states all of the obvious dangers and functions as a extra check during the intake. This prevented more situations than we'd like to admit. Even though no one liked having the customer sign the paper :)
After working in repair shops (computers and cellphones) it NEVER occured to me to create a policy like this and make the customer sign a sheet like that :(
A channel sub-section called MattF'sUp showing mistakes every now and then is something I'd totally love to watch. Gives an opportunity to raise awareness of certain issues and also to be informative. Great video!
I used to get pulled out of class constantly. Always a good time when I would get paged down to the principal's office to fix their MS Word.
For me it was just helping the teacher, the it guy was ok
I read paged as pegged
I used to have the exact same, often it was sound problems (just sound muted) - The IT people there were absolutely useless and did nothing ever.
Cool
the days of getting pulled out of class for bypassing the firewall
This and the "failed projects" video were honestly really insightful. I'd love to hear more stories like that - I think seeing things go wrong every once in a while is far more valuable to learning than just seeing everything that goes right.
This and the "failed projects" video were honestly really insightful. I'd love to hear more stories like that - I think seeing things go wrong every once in a while is far more valuable to learning than just seeing everything that goes right.
As someone who also does computer work for friends, I now always image their drive before doing any work purely as a precaution, as there will always be something I miss. It's saved me once in so far and that is once too many for me!
This is the way. Disk imaging is the coolest thing ever, I don't know why stock android phones don't support making them for identical models (IE a full disk image from an SM-G973 that only works with a G973 because that's how the system data in the image is configured).
Their whole drive? Doesn't that take like multiple hours/days for larger/slower drives?
@@amateurprogrammer25 Usually for a 1tb HDD it would be a couple hours, a 500gb SSD would be less than an hour
As someone who also does computer work for friends, l now always image their drive before doing any work purely as a precaution, as there will always be something l miss. It's saved me once in so far and that is once too many for me!
I’ve had so many similar things happen yo me that I ALWAYS try to explain to people what I’m doing before I do it. It’s a pain and it can confuse them, but there was one situation where an alarm bell went off in the person’s head (like it could’ve done for you), so I never stopped.
Loved the video, thank you so much for sharing as a PSA for everyone!
When you said you deleted her backups, I knew exactly where this was going.
The realization in the moment and the amount of stress must've been insane.
When you said you deleted her backups, l knew exactly where this was going. The realization in the moment and the amount of stress must've been insane
I've done this multiple times, man. When you're troubleshooting and in the flow it's extremely annoying to have to ask people if they need this or that file, and then wait for them to answer. That's why I stopped being the "computer guy" and dropped the idea of fixing notebooks in college. It's simply not worth the hassle.
One thing big thing I learned working I.T. the data is almost always more important than the computer itself.
Yeah this has happened to me. I was helping someone fix a computer and I emptied their recycle bin and they used it as a folder for storing things. Never make assumptions when deleting files goes, no matter how daft it may seem.
I've worked for a company that did computer help at home for individuals. I've worked there for two years and went to hundreds of houses. I have made a mistake like this during my time with this company. I was just upfront about it and the customer wasn't thrilled, but wasn't upset either. The customer had a "oh well everyone makes mistakes" attitude and that was awesome.
Question for you Matt: How upset was your friend? Was it a "my life is ruined" or was it similar to "oh well"? Somewhere in between?
Keep up the good work. I really like your in-depth technical video's.
Some of the most important data was probably the photos, so I think that if she knew that those were okay, she would have been upset but not really mad
@@rahulchandra152 I think they're backed up in icloud
The first time I experimented with Ubuntu, I wiped my internal drive with a project I had been working on for 4 years(plus a bunch of other misc. stuff I collected in those years). A pretty bit hit, but nothing more than a "Well shit, I guess that's gone. Better get back to work."
Not much could be done about it. Never experienced such data loss before, so I never even thought of backups then. These days are a bit different.
Videos*
@@gen157 me too, but when i was reinstalling windows. i'm not exactly sure how this happened but it turns out the drive selector must have selected both the second hard drive and my ssd then i clicked "delete" (to delete the partitions) and when i saw both drives say "Unallocated Space" i was like "oh well, i guess that's gone now." i had many projects in premiere pro and visual studio on there too so that was a sad day but just thought to myself "oh well lol"
I stopped watching at 2:55 to spare my soul from the incoming dread.
oh god this is relatable, I remember years ago when I was in high school getting asked to upgrade a friends computer to windows 98 and being like "yeah, I've done it a few times now" and assumed it would be the same as any other system I'd done the upgrade on
turned out that the system had weird drivers for the internal modem that wouldn't install by default from the installation disks and I couldn't get online to get them so I left them with a computer that couldn't get online while I had to go and scour the internet for the drivers, which took about a week of searching every spare chance I got when I could get online, but my dad ran his business from home so I couldn't take up the phone line all the time with internet calls
If I'd known I could have quickly downloaded the driver when windows was able to tell me what the modem was, and install after the installation
You just reminded me I used to have usb stick with drivers. It was all fine until I did a fresh install on pc with mobo that windows did not recognise usb by default
essentially this whole entire story was relatable. I too also was the kid that was pulled out of class to help the teachers, faded that away in high school, and also managed to delete the whole entire contents of the downloads folder on my cousins macbook while diagnosing a similar issue.
For me, my approach to situations like that is "Can I back this up NOW", usually with tools like CloneZilla (or in this case, DDing to an image or whatever) onto an external drive. This is something I do a lot with corrupted drives, where I practice on the image in a Unix environment, then apply the solution to the real device... unless that isn't needed and I can just use the image.
That being said, yeah... with so many backups, I would have asked, since there could have been a bigger underlying issue. One thing I would have absolutely gone after, if at all possible because F-CK APPLE, is just removing app program data. Let's face it: downloading your apps again isn't exactly the worst thing in the world, just not the data for them (like settings and game progression). I've done it enough times to know what to ask and have also heard enough horror stories of "really intelligent people" using their recycle bins as a substitute for My Documents.
But the part with being pulled out of class all the time... yeah, guilty as charged. Free child labor, FTW.
It can be very difficult at times to perfectly meet the needs of the person you are trying to help. I usually go as far as I can without having to ask them and then guide them through a cleanup. Honestly most of the time just deleting a bunch of programs helps more than anything else.
this entire video is a mood about these kind of things boosting your ego a bit, making you feel proud, and eventually you face a situation that puts you on checkmate or makes you fuck up without realizing at first. great story Matt, love u
this entire video is a mood about these kind of things boosting your ego a bit, making you feel proud, and eventually you face a situation that puts you on checkmate or makes you fuck up without realizing at first. great story Matt, love u
I learned this mistake early on with my personal drives years ago, since then I've always been paranoid about messing with other people's computers.
Family computers are a straight-up no-go (phones included) for me cause their never happy and they expect me to be their personal tech guy.
I mean this with all the best intent, if that's your biggest mistake - you're leading a good life. Keep it up
l mean this with all the best intent, if that's your biggest mistake - you're leading a good life. Keep it up
@@Theunicorn2012why are you doing this?
A mistake is a mistake tho. Even if intentions were good we must always go ahead and own it when we accidently harm others. This could have been really major and it is really nice that he did not downplay the situation
bro, matt i feel the exact same way ive had the exact same experience. teachers would be so amazed sometimes they'd pull me out of lessons for their own benefit
I've had a very similar situation once. my girlfriend at the time wanted me to clean up her file system and I helped her through Anydesk while she watched. She had a lot of files of projects from university stored on both her desktop and her OneDrive and I told her that since she has a very small boot drive and her desktop was on the boot drive, that those files took up a lot of her driver's space. She needed some space on the boot drive anyway so it seemed like a good idea to delete them from the desktop since they were backed up anyway. Soooo.. i deleted them, and shortly after found out that OneDrive decided they should delete their copies too. The files were too large for them to be in the trash and at the time, i wasn't aware of any recovery tools that could save the file types she used. So yeah, this happened while she was looking at me doing it. That was painful for both me and her.
Always backup the device your working on, even if they say there's nothing important, because chances are they just expect everything to be there by default or be untouched like photos.
Had a new starter in the office make a similar mistake once with the CEO's Outlook data. I went to recover the deleted data, but because this new guy had already started setting up Outlook again, the data got overwritten before it could be recovered.
The moral of the story? If you're working on someone's computer, bring a USB SSD so you can make a quick copy of whatever you're about to touch. Just in case.
I also used to get pulled out of class, often had half days just running around fixing stuff. They would let me do anything I wanted to and gave me study resources to make sure I kept decent grades in the rest of my curriculum. I got to learn to pull fiber, weld, and use and oscilloscope. They also gave me access to the library at all times so I could read whenever I wanted. This was for all of my schools. They also let me learn how to play 4 instruments. You should tell more stories, very interesting and relatable. Thanks for all your great content!
Due to a substantial data loss many years ago I been absolutely paranoid about it, I image my OS regularly and keep 3 copies of that image, two on other partitions (one a completely separate internal HDD as well as the 3rd copy on an external drive I put in a drawer for safe keeping. Important files / documents etc also keep two copies of backed up on a regular basis. I just refuse to go through what I did before and learned a hard lesson.
I work with computer repair. The amount of clients who come to me saying "yeah you can format it, there's nothing important" and later come crying because there actually was important data there is ASTONISHING. That's why I always ask and make it clear that formatting is definitive and they will not get any data back.
I really enjoyed this! I won't get too personal but I went through an issue at work that I was really beating myself up over, getting home and watching this reminded me that I'm not along in my screw ups among other things. So thanks Matt, I look foward to more story time kinda videos in the future, keep up the great work!
This reminds me of Tom Scott's "onosecond" story. He worked on a live database and destroyed WEEKS of work. No idea how he's still alive.
Two ways to not delete that data one is to only delete the oldest ones if you think that they are safe to delete and two is to transfer them to another hard drive. Never know when you're going to need that data.
Ideally, you should have 3 backups on 2 different types of media and 1 of them offsite.
I feel for you Matt... I had a similar-ish situation many years ago, where I decided it would be a great idea to merge 2 drive partitions into 1... with the data still on there... without a backup. It was not a great idea... the program I was using crashed, messed the drive up and I lost a whole load of data. Luckily it was my own data (if you can call that lucky!), but I felt so stupid afterwards!
These things teach us valuable lessons... now whenever I'm doing work on my PC or someone else's PC I will ALWAYS make backups every step of the way
I've actually had an opposite experience with some of my mom's files. One day she booted up her computer and all of the files on her portable hard drive were just gone. Like, windows just decided to randomly delete everything. She did not do this herself, of course lmfao. I pretty much instructed her to literally not touch anything and keep the computer on while I did some research, incase anything was stored only in RAM. Luckily, it wasn't, and all of the files where still in a temp folder of some sort. Only a few files were corrupted and using WinDirStat and the explorer I was able to save several hundred gigs of stuff from being reduced to ashes.
That was a good day for my ego >:)
I have of course made some bad mistakes before too. (Not with other people's things, luckily!) I almost bricked my own phone by trying to root it and put a new operating system on it. It would pretty much refuse to launch with all sorts of erros, and I was relegated to using an S3 with an awful battery that was 8 years old by that point, in order to still be able to communicate with my parents (I was in high school at the time)
I was able to re-install the original OS, but no rooting or new OS's for that LG V20 lmao
@@reptarien I installed custom Android OS and then locked the boot loader cuz phone showed that warning in yellow text on boot-up. It got bricked and company was asking to replace whole motherboard.
Later searched a telegram group. Found people who were probably service centre workers who can unlock boot loader with their company tools (req employee code to work). It got fixed, Had good relief.
That brings memories back ;) Lost a bunch of manga that way back in the day, rm -rf is relentless when you just oh simply forget to change the folder which has to be rfminusrf'ed. Wasn't me but the data was mine 😬
I did enjoy the video :) Love your storytelling.
This reminds me of a situation where my mate had a usb flash drive that was playing up, wasn’t showing the correct partition size or something.
So I thought okay I’ll wipe it via diskpart. Accidentally selected disk 1 instead of 2 and wiped his secondary HDD :) , lost all his games and photos etc.
About 6 months later I accidentally done the same thing on my own computer, only that time I thought to pirate a copy of some recovery software and actually recover my games etc
Wow just wow
I have an external harddrive with like 10 partitions that i'm CONSTANTLY installing Linux distros on, and I have this eternal fear of deleting the one partition with essentially everything on it.
ive done this before omg NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO THE PAIN
i got bored and i had my windows usb on me so i decided to go round school and format all the laptops and i opened up diskpart and then typed 0 instead of 1 and it formatted my usb drive, so i had to put windows back on it with rufus when i got home lol
this was because 0 (as you'd expect) should be the SSD/HDD inside the computer as the BIOS puts that in front of everything else. just that this time it was not :)
@@dxrrk why would you format the laptops?
THIS IS WHY YOU ALWAYS HAVE OFFLINE BACKUPS!!
Learning the hard way sucks, but I guarantee you never made that same mistake again. I've always said behind every great software engineer is a massive production outage, database loss, etc that should have been prevented. Making mistakes is how we learn. I hope you share more stories like this so people can normalize making mistakes instead of feeling ashamed of them!
Thank you for sharing that cringe-inducing memory :) I've had troubles with storage space and data loss on mac before so this hit me with crazy second-hand stress lol
It's an interesting phenomenon at play here. It's easy to look back and say "I should have..." or "I screwed up..." but honestly, you just had THE best lesson in how to avoid pain when doing user support, and I doubt you would have learned it as well as you did if someone had just told you the things you told us.
Whenever someone trusts another person to do any sort of work like this, the helper risks doing undesirable things. This applies as much to builders as it does to technical support people as it does to surgeons.
Working in any discipline means discovering that fine line between doing things because you know they are right and stopping to obtain consent.
I really love the visual humor in this video. Nice work!
I really enjoyed this video, and all of the comments from people with similar stories, so I'll add mine:
Back in the DOS days, I mistook a directory name that seemed to be just a random set of letters for "oh, just a temporary folder that obviously can be deleted to get back space". It turned out to be full of AutoCAD files that represented all of the engineer's projects EVER, and the random set of letters had deep significance to HIM.
I was never invited back to work at that organization again, so I don't know if they had backups or not.
As a sort-of-computer-guy myself, I truly can't understand how a techie could even _think_ of deleting someone else's backups without asking 😅😂
Yeah. Especially all of them.
Ez, just have a brain fart for a second.
I did that mistake with personal data so many times I always ask in advance if I have to handle someone else's stuff.
Brainfarts happen. How do production DBs get deleted? Because you didn't think it through and sometimes run on autopilot. I did too 😃
It certainly takes a special kind of stupid.
If you're trying to say "I would never make a mistake like this! Matt must be such a goober!" then I'm sorry to say you could definitely make a mistake like this. You are not immune to gooberhood.
I am so overprotective about my files i would never even dare to think about deleting even one bit of data of someone else without having asked the person at least 2 times explaining in much detail what i am about to delete
I had a 1:1 experience with Matt's story he outlines in the intro. 100% exactly like that
I had a 1:1 experience with Matt's story he outlines in the intro. 100% exactly like that
I think when I did something like this, I learned how to restore deleted files as well. Somehow managed it.
Also, since then, definitely asked my buddies who wanted HDD/SSD upgrades if they still needed their files and OSes, almost always bought a $10 HDD enclosure for them to do what they wanted with their files after the fact.
Best story I have is when I was tasked with re-partitioning a friend's drive. There was a useless partition taking up a lot of space, or something like that, but I couldn't just erase it and get that extra space immediately, so I went ahead and copied all the files to one of my drives. This let me reformat the original drive and claim that free space. It was all great in theory until I found that the drive I copied the data to was dead. And I found out _after_ formatting the original data. I'm sure the warning signs were there in the SMART values, but to me it seemed like the drive died in minutes. Thankfully I managed to undelete almost everything on the original drive.
That's my worst data nightmare and the reason I have three backup drives: needing a drive and realizing it's dead. My parents had video of my sister's wedding on DVD and pulled it out at their 12th anniversary. Can you guess what happens to a lot of 12 year old home burned DVDs? They SPOIL.
From my own experience, I had one of my friend's parents keep all their important files in Windows in the Recycle bin, because somebody told them they take up less space that way. They weren't happy when I emptied the recycle bin on autopilot while deleting something else from the computer.
Guess they didnt know about folder settings
About 3 minutes in, I already knew where this was gonna go.
Thank you for sharing this story - such a valuable lesson. And very relatable!
"misty-from-pokemon-inflation-fetish-rule-34" 4:57 XD
😬
🤨🧐🤔
this is why castration is the answer to everything
I can't believe there are people out there that actually use the recycle bin as storage, that's just asking for trouble. You wouldn't put physical documents into an actual bin for storage.
We all make this kind of mistake at least once.
The important thing to remember is to always communicate, even if the user of the device doesn't understand anything.
Communication, and how to translate informations in an understandable way for the user are key in fixing stuff.
And the most important of all things to consider :
In tech, we're all stupid. Something obvious for one, might not be for the other.
This was really entertaining man, I would love to hear more of your stories.
I was the underage IT guy at my school, I lost count of the number of times I had to push CTRL+ALT+UP to turn someone's screen the right way up. Luckily there was no "oops I nuked someone's phone data" moment.
This story actually gave me anxiety at 3:00
"Hey, do you have an external drive I can move some file to? No, okay, let's go to Walmart and get one for $80 so I can move your backups to it..."
This actually happened to me last month. My hard drive just broke itself somehow, so I asked the school teacher if I could borrow one from the school - they had just bought new computers and they were all fresh installs. He and the headmistress allowed me to - considering that I was the one who setup the previous computers - but didn't told me that the 128GB solid-state drive they gave me had a Windows 10 Enterprise installation with a password for the offline profile, and somehow, password restoration was turned off. I figured; this is a fresh install, I'll just do it again! So I installed Windows 7 Starter (the only Windows disc I own) and used that SSD until I could buy my own.
Then I returned it and asked for the Win10 Enterprise disc to reinstall it. It worked, but later that week I found out that some other teachers had files on that SSD! They gave me specifically the SSD that Mr. Math Teacher used to backup all the other - now decommissioned - HDs. And I had just wiped out everything. Turns out, all the teachers had everything from that drive on actual, paper documents, but they had lost a bunch of essays from students and some other grade-related docs that were digital-only.
Now the teachers hate me, but since all the students had to give the same essays again, they all knew the right answers, so they all got maximum grade and love me. But I'm still single, though.
That is in no way your fault. If that drive was so important, it should never have been allowed out of the admin office, Let alone lent to someone, further still, lent to someone to use as a system disk...
Why that drive was just kicking around like it was just some common scratch disk or general spare drive is a severe case of miss management by the school's administration.
The fact they also do not have some form of automatic backup system is also beyond me. a small NAS box in the admin office would not cost very much, even on a poorly funded public-school budget.
@@pseudonymity0000 Yeah. I just fear this kind of stuff is kinda local.
I took part on a painting competition (also last month) with 24 others and they just piled up all the paintings like books - piling up paintings is basically piling up thousand-dollar CDs. Also, I finished ninth.
But I can't help myself but agree with you. The school used to have over thirty computers, and I had setup all of them with Windows 7 and drivers and Office after the Informatics teacher was fired. Why they just chose to return all those perfectly good HDs to the Brazilian government (laws for public sectors here; not using, return) before properly setting up the PCs is anyone's guess. And yeah, with 10 new computers and 10 new SSDs, they had to give the one in use to “the artist guy from the sticks”…
Maybe I'm Jimmy Hopkins from Bully and someone in school is Garying me.
I'm reminded of this old quote;
"The only mistakes are the ones you don't learn from. Unless they're fatal mistakes. In which case, at least others can learn from them."
4:48 how did you find my trash
ayo wtf 🤔😬
I once had two files, one very old one and a newer copy just downloaded and already deleted on the server. I then wanted to delete the old one, accidentally clicked on the new one and pressed Shift+Delete, Enter. Gone.
I couldn't restore it and had to redo everything based on the old one I still had. I didn't know about any undelete tools yet.
And I once deleted 2TB of data important to me by accidentally formatting my external HDD instead of the USB I intended as a RaspberryPi boot medium...
If it was quick format it deleted nothing
Can relate to such a big mistake
Earlier this month, I tried installing arch linux as a second partition on my laptop, but I tried shrinking my main partition...
That did not go well, what happened is when I rebooted back into windows, because the install had failed, I just got a bluescreen
I rebooted into winpe (from a USB drive I made on another computer) and found the C drive to just be a file, and a folder
After some time, I found the C drive was the boot drive for some reason, but my main drive was the D drive
In there, everything seemed fine, which was to be expected when it was only shrunk by 10gb
After some time, I managed to get it to boot to a black screen, I went into winpe and replaced the Accessibility menu with cmd.exe and opened that up
With this, I tried doing stuff such as opening explorer, or winlogon, but none worked, the first makes sense because it's a system level command prompt, not sure about the 2nd though
Later, I replaced the Windows folder with an old backup of it, It worked as it it would log in, but other then that, nope
After some time, I came to the realization that there was nothing that I could do to save the windows install, so I just backed up the install to a NAS, and reinstalled windows
you probably fucked up the filesystem, what tool did you use to shrink the partition?
@@e.6z1 cfdisk
@@keltrm yup, cfdisk doesnt resize the actual filesystem, so that was probably what happened, there's a linux tool to fix NTFS filesystems which helped me when i was in your situation once but i forgot the name
Can definitely relate. Got used to run git reset --hard in certain situations, and it was never a problem because, well, version control typically has your back (git reflog etc.), but then I ran the command and realized that I had not committed my changes at any point and just deleted the work of an entire day by accident. Luckily, the code editor had the previous file state in the undo history of at least one of the files that I worked on for a few hours.
YOOOOO, someone else who had this happen to them! We had a desktop surveillance program on the computers that conflicted with a big state testing program. Our IT lady called me out of class for assistance, handed me a USB drive and said "Get to formatting, we need this tomorrow". Got me the schools WiFi code and gave me unlimited power over the classes.
You became the IT lady's sidekick, with full control over the network? Damn.
@@tbuk8350 Many IT ladies depend upon a technical sidekick to do the actual work.
Imagine listening to this story and thinking this dude was the one that fucked up and not the idiot who made so many backups that it bricked her macbook and also decided to wipe her phone for good measure
Noooooooo. My stomach absolutely lurched. Good lord.
Lurched???
8 or so year old me figured out what "Format" actually means... by doing that on the camera used for my mom's wedding photos 💀
Was good foreshadowing however cause 10 or so years later they'd divorce again anyways.
0:55
running minecraft servers and pirating adobe software are basically all I do.
IMO, Adobe software is perfectly okay to pirate, because it's way too expensive, and the company probably gets enough money from businesses alone to keep running, so you're not harming anyone.
wait, that's illegal (piracy)
@@rhebucks_zhomg it's you
@@Xnoob545 I suggested Omega notation from Yet Another Merge Game for Particle incremental, and more people probably use it in YAMG than 1.5 (which is impossible unless the second one is Embi) people, I'm guessing around a few hundred
I have a client that complained about automatic cleaning of Thunderbird recycle bin. She claimed that she uses the garbage to store important emails… yep, I feel you bro
0:20 i was and still am that guy
i was the same in school any teacher or student that needed computer help always asked me. in primary school there was only one IT assistant but she would always be teaching so i would be the only person around.
I was in a similar situation, super
Interesting video, i feel the pain. Great content as always, keep it up Matt.
Almost the same thing has happened to me at my first workplace. My colleague was complaining about her computer being slow. It was an average Windows PC, which needed a fresh installation of the OS. I explained the situation to her, and asked if she has a backup copy of all the important data, mostly the accounting and invoicing software and its data. She said of course she does. So I wiped the hard drive, installed Windows, drivers, and other software, including the accounting and invoicing software. I asked her for the backup USB flash disk. She said: "I thought you did a backup". Of course, undelete software didn't help. I got almost fired for this, so since then even if someone says they have a backup, I just make one anyway.
The moment you said there were 20 or so backups, I just thought "Well, if you still have contact you can just ask. If you're not going to do that just delete one or two."
Then you deleted all of them and my heart sank.
I find it funny how the pirate website he censored was pirate bay, which is now a website filled with malware
Thought this was going to be a typing `dd` instead of `du`
When he mentioned du I went "noooo!" audibly because I had the same thought
I did the same thing to my own mac. Did a format thinking that my time machine had backed up everything. Turns out it had been failing to backup for months. One positive from this situation is that you will remember to backup everything before deleting.
Oh man this hurts but amazing video
A worse thing than learning from the mistake would have been not learning from the mistake
0:05 oh god that same thing happened to me in 4th grade
same
My great mistake was around 2016, when I had this WD Elements enclosure with 3tb drive and I just (at that time) bought WD Blue 6TB hard drive so, I thought on upgrading my external hard drive enclosure - it worked fine for 3 days but after that files were starting to corrupt and such, so I took out 6TB drive and inserted original WD Green 3TB drive back to it. That's when the nightmare started - it didn't work, and that drive had my documents, photos and so on gathered since 2013 to 2016... took it out, connected to a pc without enclosure (since it was sata based drive) - same thing it was detected by the pc but, had to be formatted with no other way (I had no knowledge about partitions and such back then) so I did that and in frustration decided to pay 60usd for EaseUS licence so that I could deep scan the drive (which took 8 hours) anbd recover 1.8TB of data (which took 16 hours) 99.9% of it recovered fine with that 0.1% of some pictures/wallpapers being glitchy. I threw away that WD Elements enclosure and decided not to use any proprietary company enclosure with only 3rd party external enclosures. Later find out that WD's enclosure had an 8 pin chip which would lock the drive if you inserted another drive in to enclosure or something like that... same WD Green 3TB drive works fine to this day on generic external enclosure.
MattKC videos always be good
Haha this story was great, love your content. Can't wait for you to hit 500k!
You should make more story time and such dude! this is was great lol!
I can relate to your history; I was also 'computer kid' in school and have carried forward the offer of help for technical issues. When it comes to badly-broken-computer repair, I tell people that my strategy will likely destroy all the data on the machine up front. That has helped to separate the "I need this machine" from the "I need this data" requests.
I've totally done what you did to your friend to myself, like a million times.
certified mattkc moment
Pretty relatable. I've accidentally deleted files without noticing that they contained photos and videos that I cherish, and I haven't able to bring myself out to help someone with their computer problems in GENERAL as of now.
"The biggest mistake I ever made..."
Take it from me, you are young, this will NOT be the biggest mistake you ever make, plenty of time for that one my man!
It's bad enough when you do this to yourself.... So yeah a very important lesson. These are sometimes difficult questions that definitely spook me out. There's so much implicit responsibility and trust when somebody gives their device to you. Even for something trivial. But the absolute worst is when something goes wrong and you don't know of it's something you did or completely unrelated.
Well this is also a lesson for her, although it wasn't exactly her fault, you obviously shouldn't store backups on your OS drive, if you make backups for anything it needs to be on a secondary drive, an external drive, a NAS and/or cloud backup, and don't rely on just one of those things.
The 3-2-1 ruleset works fine here.
lesson here is, dont buy apple products
@@Saber_Nico I was honestly surprised since I thought Apple is THE company next to Google that wants to have your backups on their servers.
@@MegaManNeo i mean, cloud backups is good and all until you realize that your backup is still in the hands of someone else ie apple/google/microsoft
@@Saber_Nico You probably won't lose anything important like pictures, but Android's backups are still far worse than Apple's, I've never had a good experience restoring or getting a new phone, a fair number of apps won't keep their data, especially games if they don't use Google's cloud saves or their own cloud sever, so actually unless you have a rooted phone Android is actually WORSE at backups because it's rare to have a local backup of anything aside from personal media, making you even more reliant on Google's cloud if you want to keep stuff like game saves and while it isn't entirely their fault because everyone wants their own launcher, you will have to spend an hour or two swapping icons around getting your phone in order again...
I'm not a fan of Apple but credit where it's due, one of the few things Apple really does rather well are backups and device interchangeability between other Apple devices.