Tbh, you should make more MattKC stories. I bet many people can agree with this.

As someone who has almost done the exact same thing in your position i said “just ask” as soon as you said “just ask.” Learned that lesson once and have retained it since lol!

Working with IT stuff, I have had many very similar “onosecond” moments. One time, during my first week of being on the new database system team at work, I accidentally replaced the OCR field of an entire document database with blanks. Wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the fact that it was for 7 *million* documents. Fortunately it didn’t touch the fields we had populated from the week’s doc review and didn’t affect the search index, so it was just a quick append-to-field from the last backup to remedy it, but if it was any other field I would have destroyed *hundreds* of manhours’ worth of work.

If there is one thing, I have learned as a programmer, its to never just delete, always move and wait for someone to ask for the moved file

The moment you said what you did, I knew exactly how badly you messed up. That really is THE WORST mistake anyone in tech support can make. It really is quite rare that deleting something you assume to be unimportant doesn't backfire catastrophically.

the sweet sensation of sweating bullets while you're hyperthreading in your mind after realizing what you've done. it all happens in a nanosecond

Damn, hearing about things like that hurts almost as much as living similar experiences. I was also a fix the computer guy when I was in primary school and when you're like 10 ditching a lesson to help a teacher sort out a projector or some shit for an assembly makes you feel like a level 1000 mafia boss. 😂 I do actually have a successful un-deleting story from my teenage years. A friend of mine is a musician and music teacher, he used to keep all of his projects on an mac formatted external hard drive. One day he let one of his students save a project to it, but the drive wouldn't open when connected, so the student went into disk utility to initialize the drive with him not knowing quite what that means. When he saw his drive show up as empty he called me straight away and I swiftly told him to unplug it and do not write to it. He told me it had almost exactly 400GBs worth of files on and it was gone in seconds, so I heavily suspected the data was still there, he was freaked out nonetheless. I searched the web for the best reviewed file recovery software and quickly headed to TPB to find a cracked version. He brought me the drive and a second blank drive I asked him to get to dump the several thousand now unnamed files on to, left my Macbook at it for almost 3 whole days, and by the end the second hard drive had just over 400GBs of files on it, I checked loads of video files and found no corruption, everything was back and in-tact. He then dedicated many weeks worth of evenings re-indexing all of the files and called me in absolute elation to say he had just found all the files he was the most interested in out of the whole lot, the last songs he recorded with his dad before he passed away.

I am so careful with things like this, for this exact reason. What might be a completely routine clearing of space could be detrimental to another persons entire workflow so if im messing with someone elses files I dont delete anything I havent created myself

I used to get pulled out of class constantly. Always a good time when I would get paged down to the principal's office to fix their MS Word.

The "rm -rf" route is dangerous. Fell into that trap too before albeit not in situations where I had to backup someone else's machine. That said, it's nice how honest you are with that story.

As someone who used to work as a technician for a long time; this story hits really close to home. It's painful how many mistakes can be made when we all just follow a flow; instead of taking steps to verify if what you're doing is the best way to do it in that scenario. Data recovery always gives me nightmares... perform a full disc image before you start working on a drive your recovering data from if ya can!

I stopped watching at 2:55 to spare my soul from the incoming dread.

We need more MattKC storytime! I have my own story sort of relevant. I was writing a script for a personal project to pull data from specific larger graphs in the DB into their own databases since it was getting a little absurd, and I went to go test it, put in what I thought was the testing credentials and ran the script. Turns out I wasn't paying much attention and accidentally put in the URL and credentials for the production database. The script did not work right and ended up failing to properly read the data and then wrote blank data to the new db, and then deleting everything on the old DB... oops

This is exactly the reason why when I was working computer repair the store had a policy that whenever we needed to "handle" data(remove, copy, etc) we would have the customer sign a data handling sheet which states all of the obvious dangers and functions as a extra check during the intake. This prevented more situations than we'd like to admit. Even though no one liked having the customer sign the paper :)

A channel sub-section called MattF'sUp showing mistakes every now and then is something I'd totally love to watch. Gives an opportunity to raise awareness of certain issues and also to be informative. Great video!

i almost made the same mistake on a friends PC some time ago. all his personal stuff was on it. the boot was incredibly slow (thanks, windows) and would barely boot. there was no sufficient storage devices to move anything around to, so i actually went down to a close by store and bought an ssd to solve this issue. told him to just cover the price of the ssd and a little more (it was around $57 so he gave me $60). when i was setting up the new Windows installation my paranoid side started telling me that i might have selected his personal drive for formatting. luckily i had double checked and made backups prior. one was to keep all storage on an SSD and the other was a third copy of his photos on a flash drive. although nothing had been touched i was glad i had kept such safety in mind. i myself have lost so many personal projects, files, bookmarks, passwords, rare albums, you name it honestly.. to mishandling data and not making double backups. so it really make sure to go crazy to preserve things now, and with *NIX systems it's been very simple to do so. morale of this story is.. do not, under any circumstances, touch people's data in any way. treat it like radiation, like seeing it will make you go blind or that touching/tampering with it could make you sick. completely section it off from everything else and keep it in a box somewhere for someone else to handle later. i'm unsure if you've gone through courses for any sort of IT work but this is an incredible cost that came at the loss of others time and memories. mistakes like these are why people are sketched out to hire anyone to do any sort of work and always blame the computer guy for "what did you do? well it was working fine before? you broke it!". years of dealing with this from my parents made me very hesitant with people's things out the gate. so hopefully you learned from your story here and can move on to help others.

As a person who does repairs and restores for a living, this is my worst nightmare. I've had a similar incident to this once and I felt so bad! I always make a backup of anything i want to try deleting now, when possible.

As someone who also does computer work for friends, I now always image their drive before doing any work purely as a precaution, as there will always be something I miss. It's saved me once in so far and that is once too many for me!

This and the "failed projects" video were honestly really insightful. I'd love to hear more stories like that - I think seeing things go wrong every once in a while is far more valuable to learning than just seeing everything that goes right.

I’ve had so many similar things happen yo me that I ALWAYS try to explain to people what I’m doing before I do it. It’s a pain and it can confuse them, but there was one situation where an alarm bell went off in the person’s head (like it could’ve done for you), so I never stopped. Loved the video, thank you so much for sharing as a PSA for everyone!

When you said you deleted her backups, I knew exactly where this was going. The realization in the moment and the amount of stress must've been insane.

One thing big thing I learned working I.T. the data is almost always more important than the computer itself.

This reminds me of Tom Scott's "onosecond" story. He worked on a live database and destroyed WEEKS of work. No idea how he's still alive.

I learned this mistake early on with my personal drives years ago, since then I've always been paranoid about messing with other people's computers. Family computers are a straight-up no-go (phones included) for me cause their never happy and they expect me to be their personal tech guy.

I've worked for a company that did computer help at home for individuals. I've worked there for two years and went to hundreds of houses. I have made a mistake like this during my time with this company. I was just upfront about it and the customer wasn't thrilled, but wasn't upset either. The customer had a "oh well everyone makes mistakes" attitude and that was awesome. Question for you Matt: How upset was your friend? Was it a "my life is ruined" or was it similar to "oh well"? Somewhere in between? Keep up the good work. I really like your in-depth technical video's.

I mean this with all the best intent, if that's your biggest mistake - you're leading a good life. Keep it up

I've done this multiple times, man. When you're troubleshooting and in the flow it's extremely annoying to have to ask people if they need this or that file, and then wait for them to answer. That's why I stopped being the "computer guy" and dropped the idea of fixing notebooks in college. It's simply not worth the hassle.

0:20 i was and still am that guy

oh god this is relatable, I remember years ago when I was in high school getting asked to upgrade a friends computer to windows 98 and being like "yeah, I've done it a few times now" and assumed it would be the same as any other system I'd done the upgrade on turned out that the system had weird drivers for the internal modem that wouldn't install by default from the installation disks and I couldn't get online to get them so I left them with a computer that couldn't get online while I had to go and scour the internet for the drivers, which took about a week of searching every spare chance I got when I could get online, but my dad ran his business from home so I couldn't take up the phone line all the time with internet calls If I'd known I could have quickly downloaded the driver when windows was able to tell me what the modem was, and install after the installation

For me, my approach to situations like that is "Can I back this up NOW", usually with tools like CloneZilla (or in this case, DDing to an image or whatever) onto an external drive. This is something I do a lot with corrupted drives, where I practice on the image in a Unix environment, then apply the solution to the real device... unless that isn't needed and I can just use the image. That being said, yeah... with so many backups, I would have asked, since there could have been a bigger underlying issue. One thing I would have absolutely gone after, if at all possible because F-CK APPLE, is just removing app program data. Let's face it: downloading your apps again isn't exactly the worst thing in the world, just not the data for them (like settings and game progression). I've done it enough times to know what to ask and have also heard enough horror stories of "really intelligent people" using their recycle bins as a substitute for My Documents. But the part with being pulled out of class all the time... yeah, guilty as charged. Free child labor, FTW.

This story actually gave me anxiety at 3:00

Thank you for sharing this story - such a valuable lesson. And very relatable!

"misty-from-pokemon-inflation-fetish-rule-34" 4:57 XD

this entire video is a mood about these kind of things boosting your ego a bit, making you feel proud, and eventually you face a situation that puts you on checkmate or makes you fuck up without realizing at first. great story Matt, love u

Yeah this has happened to me. I was helping someone fix a computer and I emptied their recycle bin and they used it as a folder for storing things. Never make assumptions when deleting files goes, no matter how daft it may seem.

Haha this story was great, love your content. Can't wait for you to hit 500k!

Had a new starter in the office make a similar mistake once with the CEO's Outlook data. I went to recover the deleted data, but because this new guy had already started setting up Outlook again, the data got overwritten before it could be recovered. The moral of the story? If you're working on someone's computer, bring a USB SSD so you can make a quick copy of whatever you're about to touch. Just in case.

Two ways to not delete that data one is to only delete the oldest ones if you think that they are safe to delete and two is to transfer them to another hard drive. Never know when you're going to need that data.

Always backup the device your working on, even if they say there's nothing important, because chances are they just expect everything to be there by default or be untouched like photos.

I am so overprotective about my files i would never even dare to think about deleting even one bit of data of someone else without having asked the person at least 2 times explaining in much detail what i am about to delete

As a sort-of-computer-guy myself, I truly can't understand how a techie could even _think_ of deleting someone else's backups without asking 😅😂

This reminds me of a situation where my mate had a usb flash drive that was playing up, wasn’t showing the correct partition size or something. So I thought okay I’ll wipe it via diskpart. Accidentally selected disk 1 instead of 2 and wiped his secondary HDD :) , lost all his games and photos etc. About 6 months later I accidentally done the same thing on my own computer, only that time I thought to pirate a copy of some recovery software and actually recover my games etc

bro, matt i feel the exact same way ive had the exact same experience. teachers would be so amazed sometimes they'd pull me out of lessons for their own benefit

i love this laidback story time style of video! you should make more of these!

I've actually had an opposite experience with some of my mom's files. One day she booted up her computer and all of the files on her portable hard drive were just gone. Like, windows just decided to randomly delete everything. She did not do this herself, of course lmfao. I pretty much instructed her to literally not touch anything and keep the computer on while I did some research, incase anything was stored only in RAM. Luckily, it wasn't, and all of the files where still in a temp folder of some sort. Only a few files were corrupted and using WinDirStat and the explorer I was able to save several hundred gigs of stuff from being reduced to ashes. That was a good day for my ego >:)

I've had a very similar situation once. my girlfriend at the time wanted me to clean up her file system and I helped her through Anydesk while she watched. She had a lot of files of projects from university stored on both her desktop and her OneDrive and I told her that since she has a very small boot drive and her desktop was on the boot drive, that those files took up a lot of her driver's space. She needed some space on the boot drive anyway so it seemed like a good idea to delete them from the desktop since they were backed up anyway. Soooo.. i deleted them, and shortly after found out that OneDrive decided they should delete their copies too. The files were too large for them to be in the trash and at the time, i wasn't aware of any recovery tools that could save the file types she used. So yeah, this happened while she was looking at me doing it. That was painful for both me and her.

As someone who experienced formating the wrong drive I feel u bro

A worse thing than learning from the mistake would have been not learning from the mistake

I really love the visual humor in this video. Nice work!

I really enjoyed this! I won't get too personal but I went through an issue at work that I was really beating myself up over, getting home and watching this reminded me that I'm not along in my screw ups among other things. So thanks Matt, I look foward to more story time kinda videos in the future, keep up the great work!

From my own experience, I had one of my friend's parents keep all their important files in Windows in the Recycle bin, because somebody told them they take up less space that way. They weren't happy when I emptied the recycle bin on autopilot while deleting something else from the computer.

essentially this whole entire story was relatable. I too also was the kid that was pulled out of class to help the teachers, faded that away in high school, and also managed to delete the whole entire contents of the downloads folder on my cousins macbook while diagnosing a similar issue.

Thank you for sharing that cringe-inducing memory :) I've had troubles with storage space and data loss on mac before so this hit me with crazy second-hand stress lol

I had a 1:1 experience with Matt's story he outlines in the intro. 100% exactly like that

I was the same guy in primary/middle school. always helping teachers when the projector didn't connect💀

Similar things have happened to me. One doesn't ask because since he hasn't lost all faith in humanity yet, he believes the user is more than just an underdeveloped primate. Unfortunately, that's what they usually are. Backups are made in the cloud, or in the worst case, on an external device. And in the best of cases on both sides. On one occasion, a user called me out because I emptied her recycling bin, which she used to store important documents.

The same thing happened to me in school too, I was always the one that got pulled out of class to help with IT around school, students knew me as the IT guy that fixed their problems.

Noooooooo. My stomach absolutely lurched. Good lord.

It can be very difficult at times to perfectly meet the needs of the person you are trying to help. I usually go as far as I can without having to ask them and then guide them through a cleanup. Honestly most of the time just deleting a bunch of programs helps more than anything else.

I also used to get pulled out of class, often had half days just running around fixing stuff. They would let me do anything I wanted to and gave me study resources to make sure I kept decent grades in the rest of my curriculum. I got to learn to pull fiber, weld, and use and oscilloscope. They also gave me access to the library at all times so I could read whenever I wanted. This was for all of my schools. They also let me learn how to play 4 instruments. You should tell more stories, very interesting and relatable. Thanks for all your great content!

Due to a substantial data loss many years ago I been absolutely paranoid about it, I image my OS regularly and keep 3 copies of that image, two on other partitions (one a completely separate internal HDD as well as the 3rd copy on an external drive I put in a drawer for safe keeping. Important files / documents etc also keep two copies of backed up on a regular basis. I just refuse to go through what I did before and learned a hard lesson.

This was really entertaining man, I would love to hear more of your stories.

That brings memories back ;) Lost a bunch of manga that way back in the day, rm -rf is relentless when you just oh simply forget to change the folder which has to be rfminusrf'ed. Wasn't me but the data was mine 😬 I did enjoy the video :) Love your storytelling.

make more videos like this! i just absolutely love the way you talk and edit your videos, i’ll watch pretty much anything you put up!

About 3 minutes in, I already knew where this was gonna go.

YOOOOO, someone else who had this happen to them! We had a desktop surveillance program on the computers that conflicted with a big state testing program. Our IT lady called me out of class for assistance, handed me a USB drive and said "Get to formatting, we need this tomorrow". Got me the schools WiFi code and gave me unlimited power over the classes.

I share your elementary school story as the kid who was frequently excused to do computer stuff, and I also wish I'd skipped trying to be cool. Years later, the president of the company I worked for brought me his daughter's Mac that wouldn't boot. I requested the gray disc, and repaired the os but then realized they'd upgraded, and my repair reverted the os a few versions. I got lucky that I was able to repair with the upgrade disc, and everything was great. Sometimes asking questions feels insurmountable in the moment.

Kids, just remember that pirating Adobe software is morally correct.

2:50 I'm over here going "no no no no" shaking my head. I know where this is going. 😩😅

Best story I have is when I was tasked with re-partitioning a friend's drive. There was a useless partition taking up a lot of space, or something like that, but I couldn't just erase it and get that extra space immediately, so I went ahead and copied all the files to one of my drives. This let me reformat the original drive and claim that free space. It was all great in theory until I found that the drive I copied the data to was dead. And I found out _after_ formatting the original data. I'm sure the warning signs were there in the SMART values, but to me it seemed like the drive died in minutes. Thankfully I managed to undelete almost everything on the original drive.

I really enjoyed this video, and all of the comments from people with similar stories, so I'll add mine: Back in the DOS days, I mistook a directory name that seemed to be just a random set of letters for "oh, just a temporary folder that obviously can be deleted to get back space". It turned out to be full of AutoCAD files that represented all of the engineer's projects EVER, and the random set of letters had deep significance to HIM. I was never invited back to work at that organization again, so I don't know if they had backups or not.

Reminds me of when I worked in IT and had to migrate Mail Accounts from Exchange 2011 to 2019 and the first thing I learnt was "COPY EVERYTHING. YOU THINK THE TRASH CAN IS TRASH; but people out there use it as an archive or as some kind of folder for relevant stuff'"

I was in a similar situation, super Interesting video, i feel the pain. Great content as always, keep it up Matt.

I've realized as a DOS kid that became a Mac/Unix adult, that you should _always_ do everything important with the GUI, rather then the shell, if possible. In this case, I would have probably either tried to target disk mode, or even just pull the disk and mess with it on another computer, if possible. I've had decent success with Linux live enviroments as well. As a kid, I was pretty confident buzzing around DOS with the 5 (non-destructive) commands I knew, as I would never fuck anything up, and Windows 3 was a piece of hot shit. But now, with the ability to fly blind with shell commands I just googled before using, and that are _heavily_ destructive, it's a recipe for disaster. No one man should have all that zsh.

I really like this style of story telling. Would love to see more

Pleaseeee make more stories like these, they're so entertaining. Honestly some of your best content!

Learning the hard way sucks, but I guarantee you never made that same mistake again. I've always said behind every great software engineer is a massive production outage, database loss, etc that should have been prevented. Making mistakes is how we learn. I hope you share more stories like this so people can normalize making mistakes instead of feeling ashamed of them!

This actually happened to me last month. My hard drive just broke itself somehow, so I asked the school teacher if I could borrow one from the school - they had just bought new computers and they were all fresh installs. He and the headmistress allowed me to - considering that I was the one who setup the previous computers - but didn't told me that the 128GB solid-state drive they gave me had a Windows 10 Enterprise installation with a password for the offline profile, and somehow, password restoration was turned off. I figured; this is a fresh install, I'll just do it again! So I installed Windows 7 Starter (the only Windows disc I own) and used that SSD until I could buy my own. Then I returned it and asked for the Win10 Enterprise disc to reinstall it. It worked, but later that week I found out that some other teachers had files on that SSD! They gave me specifically the SSD that Mr. Math Teacher used to backup all the other - now decommissioned - HDs. And I had just wiped out everything. Turns out, all the teachers had everything from that drive on actual, paper documents, but they had lost a bunch of essays from students and some other grade-related docs that were digital-only. Now the teachers hate me, but since all the students had to give the same essays again, they all knew the right answers, so they all got maximum grade and love me. But I'm still single, though.

I feel for you Matt... I had a similar-ish situation many years ago, where I decided it would be a great idea to merge 2 drive partitions into 1... with the data still on there... without a backup. It was not a great idea... the program I was using crashed, messed the drive up and I lost a whole load of data. Luckily it was my own data (if you can call that lucky!), but I felt so stupid afterwards! These things teach us valuable lessons... now whenever I'm doing work on my PC or someone else's PC I will ALWAYS make backups every step of the way

I've been in this boat a fair few times in the past, the learning curve gets you every time!

Oh man this hurts but amazing video

0:55 running minecraft servers and pirating adobe software are basically all I do. IMO, Adobe software is perfectly okay to pirate, because it's way too expensive, and the company probably gets enough money from businesses alone to keep running, so you're not harming anyone.

It's an interesting phenomenon at play here. It's easy to look back and say "I should have..." or "I screwed up..." but honestly, you just had THE best lesson in how to avoid pain when doing user support, and I doubt you would have learned it as well as you did if someone had just told you the things you told us. Whenever someone trusts another person to do any sort of work like this, the helper risks doing undesirable things. This applies as much to builders as it does to technical support people as it does to surgeons. Working in any discipline means discovering that fine line between doing things because you know they are right and stopping to obtain consent.

Matt, this was a cool story, I really loved the bit where you put Gaius Baltar from the Battlestar Galactica series on screen, that was brilliant mate. What a fitting image.

You should make more story time and such dude! this is was great lol!

4:48 how did you find my trash

Knew exactly what you were about to do the second you mentioned "multiple iPhone backups". Have done a similar thing myself... ouch.

You can never be too good at backing up. Also pro tip if you have A LOT of drives like I do make an index of EVERY SINGLE FILE ON EACH DRIVE so you can search through ALL THE DRIVES AT ONCE without plugging anything in at all. I use the Linux command "find . > index.txt". Also create a note that describes every drive and what it generally contains and the health, size and form factor of the drive including printing a label for each drive so they are all numbered.

I think when I did something like this, I learned how to restore deleted files as well. Somehow managed it. Also, since then, definitely asked my buddies who wanted HDD/SSD upgrades if they still needed their files and OSes, almost always bought a $10 HDD enclosure for them to do what they wanted with their files after the fact.

Can relate to such a big mistake Earlier this month, I tried installing arch linux as a second partition on my laptop, but I tried shrinking my main partition... That did not go well, what happened is when I rebooted back into windows, because the install had failed, I just got a bluescreen I rebooted into winpe (from a USB drive I made on another computer) and found the C drive to just be a file, and a folder After some time, I found the C drive was the boot drive for some reason, but my main drive was the D drive In there, everything seemed fine, which was to be expected when it was only shrunk by 10gb After some time, I managed to get it to boot to a black screen, I went into winpe and replaced the Accessibility menu with cmd.exe and opened that up With this, I tried doing stuff such as opening explorer, or winlogon, but none worked, the first makes sense because it's a system level command prompt, not sure about the 2nd though Later, I replaced the Windows folder with an old backup of it, It worked as it it would log in, but other then that, nope After some time, I came to the realization that there was nothing that I could do to save the windows install, so I just backed up the install to a NAS, and reinstalled windows

I have a client that complained about automatic cleaning of Thunderbird recycle bin. She claimed that she uses the garbage to store important emails… yep, I feel you bro

One of the most incredible videos and stories I've ever seen. Because it reminded me of my past mistakes.

The moment you said there were 20 or so backups, I just thought "Well, if you still have contact you can just ask. If you're not going to do that just delete one or two." Then you deleted all of them and my heart sank.

0:05 oh god that same thing happened to me in 4th grade

0:06 this used to happen to me all the time in primary as well, I remember one time we all had a PowerPoint assignment in class and I got time to write one line because I was helping everyone else in the class. I could just be learning maths and I would get pulled out of class and be greeted by some random woman I’d never seen before needing help with her 1998 hp laptop because she was having a meeting with the schools board of directors.

i was the same in school any teacher or student that needed computer help always asked me. in primary school there was only one IT assistant but she would always be teaching so i would be the only person around.

Stopping at 3:33 because I'm angry.

MattKC videos always be good

I can't believe there are people out there that actually use the recycle bin as storage, that's just asking for trouble. You wouldn't put physical documents into an actual bin for storage.

This is why my University IT job required a rigorous training before allowing student techs to go out and do Windows upgrades (since we migrate, format, reinstall with a new image). One such situation actually had someone put us in the hot seat because they stored their sensitive documents in the TEMP FOLDER ON THE ROOT C DRIVE. My boss stood up for us on that one. It happens dude, we're all crying with you in this trauma.