Missing files conundrum...

[smurfomatic]

One of our staff members has lost a load of Word documents from their account, which is synced using Offline files to the server. This is not the entire contents of "My Docs" missing, just around 20 or so files. Laptop is running Win 7 Pro, server is running 2003 (I know, but it's being "retired" soon, I hope...)

 

Files should definitely be in My Docs as the Word recent file list shows where they were saved.

 

Simple enough to solve I think, go through the backups from before Christmas and recover them. No such luck!

 

We do daily backups to external hard drives using Backup Exec, and they wouldn't catalog properly for some reason so I used Systools BKF Recovery to search the .bkf files and recover the entire "My Documents" folder. I did this for all six backup tapes (Monday to Friday and "spare") which had various backups dated in December and January, with the "spare" having been used over November half term.

 

The files didn't appear in any of these backups, which is crazy as they were edited in mid-December by the person concerned. How they can exist in December, yet not appear on the backup taken in the first week of November, confuses me considerably...

 

I have also tried the following to no avail:

 

Search the entire server for documents with the correct name, and also all word docs.

Check through the Offline files cache on the laptop, as well as booting into MiniXP and searching the CSC folder directly. (Offline files does not report any errors, and only shows those files currently in My Docs)

Banging head on wall, swearing (when no children present) and apologising to the person who has lost their work.

 

Anyone have a brainwave as to what can be done? There are hard copies of some of these files, but others have lesson observations and planning which goes back several months.

[synaesthesia]

Think you've covered pretty much everything tbh. The problem however is a simple one; offline files... ruddy thing is more trouble than it's worth! Time to show staff the wonders of remote access/onedrive/dropbox!

[smurfomatic]

Thanks synaesthesia, we're planning to move everything over to Google Docs in the summer (hence the impending retirement of the server) so this sort of problem will be a thing of the past, hopefully. Still can't understand how it had never synced these particular files to the server, when the laptop is always "online", and the rest are OK...

[edutech4schools]

We stopped using sync at all the primary schools I look after a few years back, when we had a similar issue. We use a combination of onsite backups, offsite backups, remote desktop and Google.

[ijk]

Try logging into the laptop as the user while it is disconnected from the network. You might find the files are present while the laptop is offline and if they are you can recover them.