This is not your typical lost data story. I was a good girl and I kept my files on the network drive just like the company recommended. The only thing I put on my hard drive was junk files - things that wouldn't bother me if the hard drive crashed. But not on the network drive. The drives are backed up and even my PC has a local back up program. Can you see where this is going?

On Wednesday, August 25, I accessed my work from the network drive as always. I kept copies of my time report and my daily activities there. Since I was going to be out on August 26 for surgery, I saved everything and did the usual end of day sign out routine.

I returned to work on Wednesday, September 1 and accessed the drive through my 'Favorites' and got an error message. Thought nothing of it -- figured the network was down or something. Eventually, I went into File Explorer and accessed my private network drive from there. Ah ha! They moved me to a new server. Fine, fine. Whatever.

Not fine! On that drive were two folders: /windows and /log. That's it. Nothing else. I opened a ticket. Turned out the data wasn't migrated from the old to the new server. Thankfully, they kept archived data for 30 days, so the ticket should take care of that.

Thursday, I went home early. My surgery wore me out after half a day. Friday, September 3, I had to go to the ER and ended up not returning to work until October 5. I checked the drive and nothing changed. I checked the ticket and it was closed! According to the ticket, the problem was resolved. My foot! I immediately contacted support and explained the ticket wasn't resolved.

He asked for permission to remote control my PC. By all means. I watched him do all the things I had attempted. He passed the ticket to a specific group. I kept checking on the ticket and emailing the contact. I heard stuff like it's past 30 days so it may not be archived. Well, hey, I reported the problem within five days of the last time it worked! Why wasn't it properly resolved while I was out?

If you work for support or have worked for them - don't get me wrong, I am married to a guy who has worked in it and managed it. I've lost serious data here.

Lesson learned? I should've backed up the data onto my hard drive. If I had, then all would be cool. What are the chances of losing the network data AND hard drive data? Wait, don't answer that.

Back up early and back up often.