Help & Advice - Customer lost their files on their laptop

echoesofeleven

Today was my first day working as a PC/Network Technician for a local computer repair company in my area. Things went great overall minus the hours being stuck in traffic.
Tomorrow I'm going to a client's home to troubleshoot an issue. In the email, it stated that the customer has lost all their files on their laptop and the computer has been reconfigured.
Nothing else was mentioned on the email. I'm assuming this is a windows machine. If so, Should I check the recently updated service packs? Maybe a recent update could have caused this. Maybe by uninstalling a certain pack the files might be recovered?

I could maybe take out the hard drive out the laptop, put it one another computer, run a data recovery software. Or I could use a hard drive adapter.


If the client does not have a restore point, how should I proceed and recover their files?

nelson8403

Generally service packs do not wipe out data, I'd suspect from reading your description that the customer may have restored their machine and it is back to factory default.
It is also possibel that the user logged into a new profile, or a new profile got built due to an error and the files may just be on the hard drive in the old profile folder.

You can attempt to take the drive out and use data recovery software, however, after a restore it may not pull all of the files, or even files that are wanted.

echoesofeleven

Those are great points. Thank you! I'll make a note of it in my notebook. I'll definitely ask the client in great detail what exactly they did before losing their files.

scaredoftests

and give them advice on buying a NAS drive to backup data!!!

Verities

Use the data recovery software and scan for the file. You have a chance of finding the file as the data persists on the hard drive unless formatted over several times (think DBAN). You'll be surprised how much data you can find after someone has "lost" aka deleted their files.

joelsfood

I'd put my money on files still being there too. Profile or ransomware, but unlikely anything actually been deleted

Dojiscalper

Remember to always "keep it simple" first. Things that are obvious to us techs are impossible to most end users.

markulous

Do you need to do a RCA (Root Cause Analysis) or just recover their files?

It could have just created a new profile for them making their desktop and documents folder empty.

Recuva is a good program if they were actually deleted.

echoesofeleven

Thank you, everyone, for all the input. It really helped out today!

When I arrive at the client's home surprisingly all his files were back. The client was running Windows Vista. I spent almost 30 minutes figuring out what happened. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that it was a glitch.

I spent the rest of the hour configuring his email and running an AVG scan on his machine. Overall I was lucky that the files were back.

danny069

Whew! Well that was a close call.

stryder144

The root cause is in your last post...client running Vista! Just kidding.

Congratulations on the new job, btw.

scaredoftests

Get them a NAS drive!

ThomasITguy

Get the customer a NAS drive or a external HD.... Teach them the IMPORTANCE of backing up data....