Here’s something I don’t get: You know when, under Windows, you have a crash (an unusual event, I know), and you reboot the machine, and you discover that chkdsk has spawned a bunch of folders containing file fragments of whatever it was you were working on? How come it does this?

Seriously. I’ve yet to ever get any useful information out of those files. Even when it’s something obvious, like a Word document I was working on or somesuch, it’s always mangled with bits from other files and is totally useless. There isn’t even a good native Windows/DOS application for viewing these files. I don’t know a single person who ever bothers to sort through that junk to see if he can get something useful out of it; everyone just seems to blow the stuff up and cut their losses.

Given that behavior, why bother? Is it because chkdsk can’t handle the thought of throwing anything away? Is Microsoft a packrat’s best friend? What else is lurking in the filesystem that’s waiting to come out after a crash?