I ran into a problem that truly surprised me yesterday:
One of our remote desktop users accidentally deleted an entire folder of customer data. He was seriously angry, and rightfully so: He had pressed the Delete key on the keyboard at the wrong moment, after which the folder and its entire substructure was removed from disk without any need for confirmation.
As it turns out, this is default behavior in Windows, from Windows 8 on the client side and Windows Server 2012 on the server side. On local volumes on a regular PC, what usually happens is that the chosen documents are moved to the Recycle Bin without warning, which isn’t all too bad unless it happens to the kind of user who doesn’t always know what they’re doing.
The problem is that the same thing happens on network drives, no matter if they have Recycle Bin or Shadow Copies activated or not.
We do have working backups, so this only resulted in a few minutes of frustration for the user, but I can’t believe that this new default behavior passed testing at Microsoft, and I have no idea how they motivated the change.
The old and sane behavior with a nice and friendly dialog telling you you’re about to lose a month’s worth of work, and do you really want that, can be restored via group policy:
User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Windows Explorer / File Explorer -> Display confirmation dialog when deleting files.