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.

Meryl K. Evans is the Content Maven behind meryl's notes, eNewsletter Journal, and The Remediator Security Digest. She is also a PC Today columnist and a tour guide at InformIT. She is geared to tackle your editing, writing, content, and process needs. The native Texan resides in Plano, Texas, a heartbeat north of Dallas, and doesn't wear a 10-gallon hat or cowboy boots.