User had, in their unmistakable wisdom, created a USB drive full of shortcuts to multi-gigabyte files, and then deleted every copy of the source data. She stubbornly told me that they worked (she’d tested before deleting the originals), and that I was just trying to scam them into buying more HDDs.
Guess who needed to use their now non-existent backups the following week.
via: [Reddit\TalesFromTechSupport]
[Picture Source: Mrs. Gemstone (CC)]
This reminds me of something that happened to me a few years ago (before I was in IT).
I was given a CD with a file on it that I needed. So I popped it into my Mac (I hated Macs, but that is what we used at that office, so I didn’t have much say in the matter… this was a Mac 7 or 8 back circa 1998, give or take a year), pulled up the CD, saw the file, successfully dragged it to my desktop, and then ejected the CD.
The file on my desktop disappeared as well.
I popped the CD back into the computer, and the file automatically popped back on my desktop.
It turns out (for whatever reason) Mac was creating a shortcut to the file on my desktop, and so when the CD was out of the drive, the shortcut was invalid so Mac hid it. I was dumbfounded. It was the first time I ever experienced a situation where drag-and-drop from one drive to another didn’t result in the file being copied. I admit it took me much longer than it should have to figure out how to actually copy a file from the CD to the Mac without it being just a shortcut (it wasn’t like I could right-click on the file and say “copy”).
I LOATHED that about MacOS