Hopefully they will have learnt a valuable lesson here. The recommendation when it is eventually resolved is to get drive imaging software and religiously make a backup image of your system partitions every week, save it to a second hard drive or DVD. So if the dark brown stuff ever hits the fan in the future, restore the last weekly backup image.
At worst you may have lost 6 days of new program installations/updates, etc. and that is a breeze compared to what has happened. There are also backup programs that will backup your data files, etc. and that should be used at least once a day, for your data files that change regularly. Make a backup and recovery plan, what to backup, when and how to recover.
If you don't want to lose it, back it up; if you fail to plan, then you plan to fail.
Back & Recovery Strategy:If you have a back-up and recovery plan, you can recover from anything in minutes, not hours or days.
1. back-up all the things that you don't want to lose, data files, like documents, spreadsheets, emails, email account details, registration keys, address book, favourites/bookmarks, downloaded files/programs, etc. the list goes on and on but if you don't want to lose it back it up. There are many back-up programs that can simplify this task and run it every day.
2. Recovery - re-installing your system really is a poor choice and one of last resort. There are tools (Drive Imaging software) that take exact images of your Partitions or Hard Disks and these images can be restored in minutes if you suffer a major catastrophe and that doesn't have to be a virus attack.
I do a weekly image of my partitions and save them to my 2nd hard disk, they can also be saved to off-line storage, DVD, USB external hard disk, etc. as part of my weekly system maintenance.
So if the worst comes to the worst at most I lose:
- 6 days worth of program updates or new installations, but with my daily back-up I can recover most of that.
- less than one days data files, emails, etc.
None of these is a problem and much quicker than a system reinstall and I don't have to go on-line to download the myriad of security updates needed to secure my system where there is a chance to get reinfected whilst my system has vulnerabilities because of these missing patches. Not to mention all my system tweaks and program settings are retained and I will have saved myself many hours of work and a huge amount of stress.