my g/f works for an american software company, and her machine was infected by some pretty evil spyware yesterday, which their corporate solution never picked up.
She calls MIS in a panic and tells them what's going on... they say... don't worry, bring it down to us,and we'll rebuild your machine.
Takes it down to them, then calls me and says - "do I need anything off my machine before they reformat it?"
Ummm yeah...
Lets consider for a moment the 4 years of e-mail that she has to keep on her machine to satisfy the auditors (who are in at the moment) (and because MIS have capped her exchange account at a mere 1gb)
All of the document copies that she keeps on her machine as their sharepoint site doesn't really work unless you're in the office.
The master planning documents for all of her projects... etc.
These jokers don't even have a dedicated machine to mirror notebook hdd's (only desktop)
So I've just spent the last 6 hours cleaning and tuning her machine - not to mention doing complete backups of all her data - so if MIS do decide to do somehting completely stupid, at least she won't lose all her work.
She's going to have to have a quiet word with the vp. of mis about this, as it's clearly unacceptable that a) these guys don't know what work she's doing on this laptop, and b) that they don't have full backups already (due to lack of size allocated to their corporate backup application - which wasn't even configured on her laptop!)

Shocking