Client had SBS2k3 server which, as they always did, was butting up against the Exchange storage limit.

A quick review revealed, as they always did, that high-use users had massive Deleted Items folders.

Set a quick group policy to 'empty deleted items on exit' and pat self on back for a job well done.

Nope.

Several of them had worked out that hitting 'delete' was quicker than dragging a completed email to a different folder or flagging it as complete, so that was their workflow for archiving messages. It was absolutely essential, of course, that they were able to retain them.

It's always baffling that no matter how much we try to use familiar concepts and real-world analogies when designing applications, some users just completely miss it.

Imagine someone putting important paperwork in the recycling bin, and complaining when they find out cleaning staff threw it out overnight.

Or having a massive pile of photos, random bits of paper and possibly even DVDs on the surface of their desk, and complaining they can't find anything, while the desk drawers are completely empty. Oh and I suppose in this metaphor the recycling bin would actually be on the top of the desk too.

My working theory is that some users haven't developed object permanence yet.

Storing things out of sight just makes it disappear for them.

Can be quite problematic when combined with sticky notes.

In at least a few cases, I've seen the recycling bin ending up inside one of the DVDs on the surface of the desk, in apparent violation of all laws of both physics and common sense.

Don't you hate it when you're casually dragging your recycling bin across your desk, it slips out of your hand, and just disappears into a different object?

"a massive pile of photos, random bits of paper and possibly even DVDs on the surface of their desk, and complaining they can't find anything"

This is the One Pile filing system. It's advantage is that you always know where something is. It's in that pile.

Not being able to find something happens when it gets tidied into drawers. Anyone who uses that system can tell you that. Those empty drawers are a dangerous temptation.

Another advantage of the One Pile system is that it is self-sorting. The "important", recent, stuff can be found near the top, whilst the "it can wait another week" stuff magically works it's way lower down.

Way back when I was a civil servant any papers you threw out had to be torn through before binning otherwise you'd find them back on your desk the next day. Apparently it was a measure to stop claims of, "It must have been thrown away accidentally!"

Out of habit I still do this.

I'd be surprised if anyone who administered SVS2K3 hasn't encountered exactly this problem!

Predictable that this would be the first comment. It's a consequence of (a) email clients not being designed with reasonable use cases in mind and (b) admins not keeping up with growing storage requirements which is also part of Huon's users' problem.

Another punnery well done.

I'm on my way for celebrating it with that --->

Others may groan at the punnery. Let us have our punning funnery.

...you should really take a look at the folder you're going to purge before pushing a script like that.

Even a quick glance at the folder structure would've revealed that the users didn't quite understand the definition of "temporary".

Don't get me wrong, it's definitely the bean counters' fault, but it could've been prevented.

Wouldn't be the first time important files or mails end up in a temp folder or the recycling bin.

...the users didn't quite understand the definition of "temporary".

In IT there is nothing more permanent than temporary.

Not just IT! There is nothing more permanent than a temporary fix that works.

Tell me about it. When I moved to France and discovered that unfurnished meant no kitchen units either, I built a temporary kitchen from the moving boxes and duct tape. Lasted two years.

Ha! I guess we are all guilty of that one.

Have one of these--->

This also applies to staff.

"you should really take a look at the folder you're going to purge"

Security might have prevented that. OTOH an enquiry wouldn't have been out of place.

Doing clear out/tidy up of /var/tmp on a Solaris server and deleted a file - which apparently was vital to the operation of the application. At least the app team lead acknowledged it shouldn't have been there and was able to recreate it.

Then I did it again about a year later... oops!

The saving grace for me was that app was pernickety as hell and prone to falling over at the best of times.

Posting anonymously because, well....

I worked for an insurance company (long since gone) and we were moving from Windows 3.11 to Windows NT 4.0. We weren't a rich company so we were upgrading the OS using the `ghost` application, one machine at a time (two if we had two floppy disks and a spare source hard drive)

Before each upgrade we visited or emailed the users and told them that they would lose everything that was not in the "C:\DATA" folder (which we had created for them when we built the machine in the first place). We stressed this several times as that was the only folder we were going to back up to the Netware 3.1.1 server (see the kinda era we're talking about here?) so if they wanted to keep it, the data needed to be in that folder and nowhere else. Everyone understood. We repeated it. They understood even more.

We spent weeks doing the upgrades one department at a time. We had smaller offices around the country (Glasgow to Bristol) so we'd visit for a day, do the deed, and then either head home or onto the next closest office (Newcastle and Glasgow were usually done in one trip over a couple of days. Where else was I going to get a proper Scotch Pie from?).

The only problem we had was at Head Office in the Finance Department. We did HO machines over night (mainly to minimise disruption, but also for the overtime). We'd spoken to the sub-head bean counter and he was ready. We backed up his DATA folder, ghosted the machine, then copied his documents folder back again. Job done. Beer deserved.

The next morning we got a phone call from sub-head bean counter asking where his data was. We told him that it was in his DATA folder. He replied:

SHBC: But I have data in other folders. I need that back too

IT: It's gone

SHBC: I need that data back. It's important

IT: We told you that we'd only back up the C:\DATA folder

SHBC: I thought you meant all my DATA folders, not just that one

IT: It's not happening. We didn't know about those other folders, and we don't have time to search hard drives for data

SHBC: But it's important company critical data

IT: Oops.

We had a good boss. Ken was big. Ken was scary. Ken was the one who decided what was allowed on his network. No one messed with Ken and, if he knew you didn't do anything wrong or had been proven guilty of something, he'd defend you to the end. He went and had "a chat" with said bean counter. Nothing was ever heard about it again. EVERYONE got their documents into the right folder after that

At the time Windows often lived in a mess of its own making

Doesn't help narrow it down, really.

You're using Windows and you do not allow local storage ?

You clearly don't know Windows users.

I recall my university had rooms of PCs (this would be '95 or '96) which had no local hard drive, everything was done over the network.

Given that we were stringing our own PCs together via ribbon cable between parallel ports for Duke Nukem, this was serious voodoo.

Lovely solution for situations like that, especially considering the cost of storage at the time.

PXE made this a lot easier, but i believe that wasn't released until '98 or '99.

Also, not sure if the Voodoo pun was intended, but have one of these either way --->

"You clearly don't know Windows users."

And forgot what the P in PC stands for.

PC nowadays is most likely "Probably Crap"...

I'm not sure whether The Reg doesn't mention Huon, brother of Hurin, of Tolkien's Silmarillion fame, because it does know us so well, and doesn't need to point that out to us, or because it doesn't, and overlooked that aspect of it.

ETA: I'm an idiot. Of course, that's Huor, not Huon. Stoopid brain association.

Huor Huor

Well, I was thinking the submitter was a dark ent, to be honest

"We considered "Hunter" but decided against it lest it fuel certain conspiracy theories"

I suspect that little comment won't age very well. A bit like someone in the New York Times during 1973 saying "What's all this fuss in the Washington Post about Watergate, it's just a conspiracy theory".

Let's wait and see.

I saw that and initially thought of 'hunter2' https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/hunter2

On a clear drive you can seek forever

I know someone who keeps documents in GMail drafts. Occasionally they send one of the documents to someone, then copy it from Sent back into Drafts. I sometimes provide some unofficial IT support for them, but after having tried to explain why this is such a dreadful idea and suggesting several more reasonable ways of doing things to no avail I've simply had to refuse to provide any support for such a fundamentally misguided setup.