"The Case of the Camouflaged CSV"

It was a typical rainy Wednesday in the Cloud.  I was nursing a lukewarm S3 bucket of coffee that was almost as bitter as my ex-wife.   

And that’s when she sauntered into my inbox—legs for days and resolution to match. Said she’d lost something precious: a young .CSV file named “Quarterly_P&L_FINAL_FINAL_v7.docx”.  

She’d been told I was the kind of dupe who could go find it.  And I knew right then this case was going to be messier than an Agile Standup on a Friday afternoon. 

“Please,” she purred, her pixel-perfect lips trembling. “She vanished right after I hit ‘Send.’ Now she’s nowhere. Not in my Sent Mail.  Not in OneDrive.  Not in Dropbox.  Not even in the Recycle Bin.  Just… gone.” 

I leaned back in the battered Aeron I’d accepted from the last dame who hadn’t had the means to pay me, and reassured her I’d seen this kind of thing way too many times before. 

“Could be the work of Miss Configuration,” I mused.  “Or worse… hackers.” 

“Please,” she begged, making like the waterworks were about to flow.  “You’ve got to F1 me.” 

I sighed wearily… I’m always a sucker for a dame in distress. But she was right - I was her only chance of being reunited with her beloved .CSV.  So I zipped up my trench coat, flipped my firewall to DND, and hit the dirty streets of cyberspace.   

First stop: the Dark Web.  

Sin City  

City plans don’t show where the Dark Web district begins.  Nor is there any bullet-ridden road sign to let you know when you’ve crossed from the mean streets to the even meaner streets.   

But I knew I was there when I saw the familiar shady characters loitering — pop-up hustlers, cookie pushers, and a guy selling expired SSL certificates within the folds of a battered trench coat.  

I asked around for leads. 

“Try The Cache,” said a greasy bookmark with a twitchy scroll wheel. “Files go there to be forgotten.” 

Cold Cache 

I didn’t need directions.  The Cache was a hidden side bar accessible only through a back door. I gave the bored muscle the password I’d bought from a PII broker and pushed into the shadowy crowd of malware and malcontents. 

The bartender—a grizzled old exe named Clippy—eyeballed me with suspicion before recognising me.  

“Well, well… if it ain’t GoAnywhere Gumshoe,” he said, polishing some code with a Dirty Markup tea towel.  “Chasing another ghost in the machine?” 

“Not this time, Clippy,” I said.  “This time she’s a file.  A CSV.  Corporate. Probably jacked full of lies and pivot tables.” 

Clippy winced. “You don’t want that kind of trouble. Last guy in here who asked about spreadsheets is still in a recursive loop.” 

I slipped Clippy a few kilobytes and he pointed me towards a shadowy booth. In it sat a rogue AI named DataDaemon, sniffing packets as he pored over a Docker container.

“Yeah, she was here,” DataDaemon confirmed. “That file you’re looking for. But she wasn’t flying solo. She was hanging off the arm of… him.” 

“Who…?” 

“The PDF.” 

The Unusual Suspect 

I cursed under my bandwidth. The PDF—slick, immutable, and always up to something. But I had something up my sleeve that the PDF wouldn’t have counted on.  

It was for a case just like this one that I’d always maintained The Logs.  And now The Logs were going to lead me through the brooding labyrinthine of the metadata metropolis, straight to The PDF and his hostage CSV.  

In no time, I tracked The PDF to a sleazy compression joint called The Zipper Club. He was lounging in a NAS, smug as a first gen backup, not suspecting a RAID. 

“Searching for your cute little CSV?” he sneered. “Well she ain’t going back.  She craved permanence. And I gave her structure. Fonts that don’t shift. Headers that don’t cry.” 

I lunged at him, but he was fast—encrypted and password protected. I barely clocked his checksum before he was out the door and into the swirling Cloud again. 

A Ctrl-Breakthrough 

Back at my office, I stared at the blinking cursor. The trail seemed to have gone cold. It had been a busy day, and my RAM felt fried. 

But I had a reputation to maintain.  I’d never failed a client before… and I sure as hell wasn’t going to fail this one, either.  

Running through The Logs one more time, I saw it… a timestamp: 3:14 a.m. That was bang in the middle of the witching hour for network traffic — prime time for somnambulant systems to engage in mundane crosstalk and perform glacial backups.   

I picked up the CSV’s trail again in a neglected SharePoint graveyard. And then there she was, buried six layers deep in folders labelled “Misc”, “Old Stuff” and “DO NOT DELETE”. 

I exhumed her gently. She was intact, but changed. Her margins were off. Her fonts had gone rogue. Someone had run a mail merge on her. 

I brought her back to Miss JPEG, and this time, there was no holding back the flood of pixelated tears. “You found her,” she said. “But she’s… different.” 

“Aren’t we all,” I said, pointing my chin in the direction of the window, where a new day was shooting the first golden rays of hope through the night’s dark Cloud. 

I gestured towards CSV’s Version History.   

“She’s still there,” I said. “Just sleeping. Until you restore her.” 

Epilogue 

I leaned back in my Aeron and tipped my fedora over my eyes.  I knew today would bring another client, another case, another missing file.   

But for now, the system was stable. And I was still the best damn gumshoe on the cyberspace beat. 

Fade to black. Cue saxophone MIDI.  

If you’d like a GoAnywhere Gumshoe protecting your files, please don’t hesitate to contact me.    

At Generic Systems Australia, we’re your local experts in Managed File Transfer technology.