I sometimes get Mac owners ask me to help them with occasional problems.

I admit I’m not a Macintosh expert, but I can usually figure things out.

This time, customer says that she seems to have lost all her emails, and her desktop icons and pictures have changed.

I say I’ll take a look.

Once I’m in front of the Mac, it soon becomes obvious that the OS has somehow reverted back to “factory default” settings.

There are no old documents, no old emails, and there are no email accounts.

I do a search for some obvious file names (customer has a business, so the business name should show up somewhere… but it doesn’t).

I try to get the email going, but the customer believes that she doesn’t need an email password (she uses an email associated with her business domain… so I can’t call her ISP for a password reset).

All I can suggest is getting the mail details from the company that setup her domain (many years ago).

As a last resort, I give Frank a call (he’s much better at Macs than I am), and ask if Macs have anything like the XP system restore.

It seems that its possible to use something called time machine, but it seems it isn’t enabled by default (and I see no evidence of time machine on this Mac).

What puzzles me most is how a system could get wiped without the customer receiving some very obvious warnings that the system is about to get re-installed, and that all data is about to be lost.