This pilot fish gets an email from a user who can’t open the program used to track equipment calibration, so she takes the short walk to the user’s desk. There, she finds that the user is getting a “data file not found” message when he tries to open the program.
Says fish: “I opened the sample data so I could determine the name and location of the file the program needed.”
Turns out the data files are on the network drive, which is backed up daily, so fish asks when the user was in this program last.
“About a month ago,” he says.
Fish has already swapped the tape in for the nightly backup, so she checks to see if the two-week-old tape already in the drive has the file. Sure enough, it’s there, and fish restores the file and returns to the user’s desk — and now he can open the program and see his data.
Then he asks, “While you’re here, can you help me with something in this program? I’m trying to export data and I got too much data when I did it earlier.”
As fish watches, user sets a filter on the data that fish has just restored, then explains that he only wants to export the data he can see there. Fish works through the process with him until he has what he’s looking for.
“Thanks,” user says when they’re finished. “You know, I may have been the one to delete that file. This morning when I tried this export, I got too much data and I deleted the file I created. I wonder if I accidentally deleted the wrong file.”
So you had this program open this morning? fish asks.
“Oh, yeah, I did,” user replies. “And I made changes to the data last week.”
Sighs fish, “Fortunately, I hadn’t sent the prior night’s backup tape off-site yet, because I had to restore the file again. Thirty days, 30 minutes — who’s counting?”
