I've owned my own IT company for 8+ years, even worked as an employee for a couple of companies as a network administrator and have managed to keep my mistakes down to mere nuisances; not catastrophies. That is until last Saturday!

I was at a client's upgrading their workgroup to AD and part of the process was to wipe the executive machines clean and do fresh installs of XP.

Everything was going smoothly until I ran into a problem with Quickbooks on the machine used by the CFO. By the time I had it squared away I was running short on time so I started rushing.

OS install went fine. Quickbooks loaded fine. I copied his profile back to the local machine and found out to my horror I was missing his profile's "local" subdirectory which houses the mail DB for Outlook!!!!

In my haste I never verified his mail files were accounted for when I copied to the server!!! I ended up deleting 1.5 years worth of non-recoverable emails containing everything from personal contact info to much needed company financial transactions... ugh!

Needless to say the next day I called him up and apologized my ass off. But luckily for me he was very forgiving. Let's hope this isn't the start of a bad trend! ~Rich