Too Much Information... Really.

Another user came to me the other day, worried about some pictures he couldn't delete. Apparently, he had some pictures (about 30-40 pictures) on his USB drive that he had taken of himself, by himself, in a hotel room. All I can say is, highly inappropriate pictures. Which he insisted in showing me, "so I'd understand how serious this was". 'Nuff said.

But he needed to use his USB drive to transfer a presentation to a meeting. So he copied the pictures into his "My Pictures", so they wouldn't just pop-up during the meeting. The trouble is two-fold; not only did he forget to move them back onto his USB drive afterward but user's folders are also redirected to a central file server, for ease of backup. These folder, in turn, are also subject to Windows Shadow Copy backups twice a day.

He panicked when he found that he could right-click on his "My Pictures" folder, select the "Previous Versions" tab and still find copies of those pictures. He had tried over and over to delete them but couldn't. Note that these are the shadow copies that Windows has made and not directly accessible by everyone. But he proceeded to ask me, in earnest, to help him delete those pictures from the server. I told him I'd look into it but really didn't have much hope at finding a way to do so. But before I could even look for a solution (having never come across a situation like this before), he wanted to show me that he wasn't the only one doing "crazy stuff like this". He pointed me to some videos in another user's folders; highly inappropriate videos, which he wanted to show me "so I'd understand that he's not the only one doing this type of stuff". Do these people even do any work?

So I look and find no way to remove these files (not surprised). And I discover that the Shadow Copy service only retains 30 days of backups, deleting the oldest as new ones are created. And his pictures are on the 3 oldest backups available. In other words, his pictures have been there for almost a month and he's just stumbled upon them. So I tell him not to worry, they'll be gone by the middle of next week and no one will be the wiser. He's sweating over this (literally) but thanks me for trying and agreeing to not tell anyone else at his company. And then he insists on shaking my hand.

I'm half-way considering requesting not to go back to this client.