Reply to: Deleting Systems You Don’t Understand

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Those .ini files seemed unimportant to a child, but they are configuration files used by several applications, including the operating system. While the Windows Registry did exist in Windows 95, .ini files were still commonly used. When I deleted them, any application or process that relied on them failed to load and simply crashed.

Anyone who had anything of importance on that computer lost it. Everyone except my father, who carefully kept copies of his documents on floppy disks. He knew I was up to no good.

Throughout my career, I’ve seen many people make this same mistake. When something doesn’t look important to them, they delete it. Whether it’s a programmer deleting a function that “looks stupid,” or a DBA dropping a table or a single field they assume no one will miss. It’s all the result of the same mindset: “I don’t think this is important.”

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Not the same thing at all, but once, early in my career, I needed to use a colleague’s computer because mine was tied-up doing something-or-other. He was off for his lunch, so I asked if I could borrow his and carry on testing the system I’d been developing from there.

My tests involved making a ton of CSV files, uploading them into a tool, getting the mutated results back, and comparing them. Dull stuff, and it made a load of temporary files. So I dutifully dumped all the mess I made into the Recycle Bin and, when I was finished and returned to my own desk, I emptied the Recycle Bin.

My colleague returned and he was furious. “Did you empty my Recycle Bin?” he fumed.

“Yes,” I said, “Sorry; was that a problem?”

“I was keeping all kinds of important documents in there!” he replied.

Turns out that the software he was using to measure how much disk space he had left didn’t include the Recycle Bin in its count; after all, that could be freed-up in a moment! And so, to “save space”, he’d taken to storing large (but important) files… in the Recycle Bin so that they didn’t take up space (at least, according to the tool he was using: obviously they were taking up space in reality).

This guy wasn’t 10 years old. He was over twice that, a recent university graduate with a software engineering degree.

Everybody can make these mistakes!