Reply to Bill F.'s Post: I am a computer service technician and consultant, self employed. I hold certifications from Comp TIA and Microsoft.
This situation began several weeks ago when I got an early morning call from a guy who was having trouble with his computer. He could not get his email to work, and could not get on the internet. When he would start outlook express to look at email his system would crash. This had started when he opened an email attachment, and he went on to say that he had been getting warning screens on boot up saying that his Macafee anti-virus was not installed correctly. He had been getting these error messages for some months. He seemed fairly offended when I told him that I could not drop everything and take care of him. I suggested that he try the Windows System restore procedure, and walked him through starting it up over the phone. I told him to call me back if this didn't work and I would get to him as soon as I could. I did not hear back from him.
Last week, he called again and said that the system restore had worked, but only briefly, and he was back where he had been. I scheduled a service call for the next morning. He was very concerned about his files, particularly his quickbooks data files. I told him I would do my best to protect these.
When I arrived the next morning, I began by backing up his “my documents” folder and his wife's “my documents” folder to a flash drive that I had brought for that purpose. Knowing that Quickbooks does not use these folders for data storage, I went to the start menu, found the Quickbooks executable, right clicked and pulled up the program's properties page and noted the the home directory was C:\program files\Intuit\Quickbooks Pro. I then copied that entire directory to the same flash drive, I checked the contents, and found both a data file and a backup file for “Weber Landscaping” the name of his company.
After consulting with the client, I suggested that the best next step would be to uninstall Macafee, and try to get a clean re-installation. He said okay, so I proceeded. In doing this, I found some remnants of an older installation of the program. I explained to him that having two antivirus programs running was very bad, and could well be why the installation was throwing up the error screens. I then uninstalled the old version and then the new version. I then tried opening up his email program, and it opened fine, and downloaded a number of messages.
When I closed the email program, I suddenly saw that a lot of files were missing. This included documents, programs, and settings. Clearly, the system had gotten corrupted. There could be any number of reasons for this happening, but my uninstalling the antivirus programs would not do this to a healthy system. In all probability, the hard drive was starting to fail, and behaving erratically. I later learned that the sytem was nearly five years old, and was on the original hard drive.
At this point I told the client that the best course would be to do a complete reinstall of windows, his applications and his data files. He went ballistic, saying he had to work on Quickbooks that day. I told him that there really wasn't anything I could do about that, and then offered to set up quickbooks and his data files on another computer so that he could get back to work. He had a dell notebook, so I began by installing his printer drivers to that machine, and then Quickbooks. I then copied all the files back from the flash drive and we opened Quickbooks, only to discover that the files I had backed up were three years old. I asked him about his backups, and the only ones he could find were also three years old. It became fairly, clear to me that he did not have any systematic back up protocol in place. If he was backing up at all, he was backing up to the same hard drive. This obviously does absolutely no good in the event of a hard drive crash. I have not worked extensively with quickbooks, but every financial program I have ever worked with is very clear about the importance of doing regular backups, and backing up to some sort of external and/or removeable media. I would be stunned if quickbooks did not make the same warnings. The client went on a tear about how he was computer illiterate, and that losing the files was my responsibilty.
I then took his computer with me, to look into data recovery to try and get the files back. Since the drive is still being seen by the computers bios, the odds are that the problem has to do with corrupted directory structures. The chances of recovering files in this case are excellent, particularly if the drive has not been formated or overwritten.
At home I did some research, and decided that the safest course would be to use a data recovery service, rather than trying to do it myself. I called and explained this to the client, who agreed. I opened up his tower to remove the drive, and found that it was very dusty inside. Dust blocks airflow, which increases heat, which increases the chances of component failure. I have not cleaned out the computer, and I have photographed the interior.
The hard drive is currently at the data recovery shop, in line to be worked on.
So... what kind of liability exposure am I looking at. And what steps should I be taking next.