At Least It Wasn’t OVER 9,000!!!!

I get a ticket from an employee.

Employee: “My hard drive is almost full. Can you help?”

Me: “Okay. What have you been doing lately on the PC that is taking up so much space? For example, have you been downloading a lot of files lately? When did you last clear your cache?”

And so on.

I remote in, go into the browser, and clear the cache, but [Employee] is still uncomfortable with the free space on their drive. I clear the %temp% folder. [Employee] is still uncomfortable with the remaining free space.

Concerned something might be wrong, I start running a security scan on [Employee]’s PC. For a while, the filenames being shown are all similar. They go like file1.txt, file2.txt, and I think it stops at around file5000.txt. I then check the files, and yup, they take up a lot of space.

Me: “Why do you have 5,000 copies of the same file?”

Employee: “I was trying to back it up.”

Apparently, keeping 5,000 copies of the same file was a good way to do so, and they didn’t get the meaning of “have multiple copies of your data”.

Trying not to laugh over the call, I simply told the employee that they could upload the file to the network drive. [Employee] then uploaded the file to the drive and deleted the 4,999 copies of the same file.

Now, they were comfortable with the free space on their drive. I ended the call and closed the ticket, and hopefully, they won’t make the same mistake again.