The Coding Monkey

Wednesday, March 29, 2006

The Hidden Perils of Drag and Drop

Have you ever been in Windows Explorer, and while clicking here and there, you accidentally click and drag a folder into another folder? Pretty common right? No real harm... all you have to do is go in and move it back.

Now imagine coming in to work one morning, logging in, opening Visual Studio, and finding out that your Visual Source Safe repository for your project is missing. After placing the appropriate calls to the "Help Desk", they tell you that its accidentally been deleted, but they're not sure by who are why. Then they tell you that they're not sure they have a backup.

Fast forward a day to find out that they have a backup, but it's off site in another state and will take a while to get here.

Fast forward one more day to find out that they didn't actually delete the repository, but someone accidentally moved it (most likely via Drag and Drop given where it was moved to), and didn't realize what they did. Moreover, they're still not sure who did it.

How could they not be sure you ask? Well, as it turns out, this particular server has a global share on it that pretty much everyone has access to. And as it turns out, pretty much everyone here has access to the C$ drive on everyone else's machine too... by design. So if I want to, I can easily delete all the files off of a coworkers computer if I'm upset at him.

Finally today we got our repository back, after two days of down time. I won't say what client I work for... but I will tell you that this is no mom and pop shop. They should know better.

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