Victoria University of Wellington accidentally nukes files on all desktop PCs:
[On March 12th], IT staff at the Victoria University of Wellington started a maintenance procedure aimed at reclaiming space on the university network—in theory, by removing the profiles of students who no longer attend the university. The real impact, unfortunately, was much larger—affecting students, faculty, and staff across the university.
The New Zealand university's student newspaper reported the issue pretty thoroughly this Wednesday, although from a non-IT perspective. It sounds like an over-zealous Active Directory policy went out of bounds—the university's Digital Solutions department (what most places would refer to as Information Technology, or IT) declared that files stored on the university network drives, or on Microsoft's OneDrive cloud storage, were "fully protected."
A grad student reported that not "only files on the desktop were gone" but "my whole computer had been reset, too," which would be consistent with an AD operation removing her user profile from the machine entirely—in such a case, a user would be able to log in to the PC, but into a completely "clean" profile that looked factory new.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 21 2021, @05:00AM (6 children)
I have this little piece of freeware, worked like a champ on Win7 when I accidentally "deleted" a file.
Free Undelete
Just a guess, maybe it works on these fancy network drives too?
(Score: 2) by gringer on Sunday March 21 2021, @05:27AM
The deleted files were those stored locally on the computer; network shares were fine.
Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 21 2021, @06:24AM
Those kinds of utilities only work if run directly on the server and always require administrator rights.
(Score: 4, Informative) by KritonK on Sunday March 21 2021, @08:58AM (3 children)
Undelete works well with FAT and FAT 32 file systems, where the only thing you usually lose is the first letter of the name of the recovered file. Who uses FAT and FAT 32 these days, though?
With NTFS I rarely had luck in recovering a deleted file, as it seems that the first things that get overwritten in NTFS are the most recently deleted files. By the time you've realized that you've accidentally deleted a file, it's already gone for good.
The best undelete I've used is called "copy from backup". It's not perfect, but unless I delete a file before backing it up or I realize I've deleted it long after it's also been removed from backup, it usually works great.
(Score: 4, Funny) by c0lo on Sunday March 21 2021, @10:33AM
Just send your files over internet to a foreign server and let NSA handle the backup. Might be a bit costly to recover them, tho'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 21 2021, @08:20PM
Funny you should mention. Camera cards use FAT, and I have the clusters from one card sitting around until I can undelete files I lost by accident.
FAT undelete relies on files not being fragmented, but this camera would write the first few clusters a stretch ahead, and then continue writing at a closer location, interleaving the high resolution and low resolution files together in some manner. On delete, the first cluster is still visible in the structure, but the remaining locations are lost.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 22 2021, @03:12AM
Most USB drives and memory cards are factory formatted as FAT32 since almost anything can read it.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 21 2021, @05:26AM (5 children)
Keep using MS crap.
Even worse, MS "certified engineers."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bart9h on Sunday March 21 2021, @01:08PM (2 children)
I dislike the so called MS crap as much as you, but it seems that this was a case of human error, and could happen with any system.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 21 2021, @01:21PM
The first line of defense against human error is to make sure that the instrumentation helps the human. Sure, it could happen with any system, but it happens first to the system designed to coddle idiots, not the system that enables professionals.
(Score: 4, Touché) by NateMich on Sunday March 21 2021, @01:52PM
He also mentioned his dislike of their certified engineers, so that was covered.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 21 2021, @06:04PM
Hey, this is one of Jacinda's children, her "refugees" from nobody knows where. Ahmed just started in IT, give him a break. He runs his uncle's old Prius as an Uber at night, so he gets access to some drunk white p***y.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 21 2021, @06:50PM
exactly. IT staff? no. they are fucking windows users. Too lazy and stupid to be in charge of anything.
all the client machines running windows deserve what they got too. act like a slave, get treated like a slave.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 21 2021, @05:35AM (1 child)
People have backups of important stuff, right?
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 21 2021, @12:49PM
The places I've worked typically had rules against attaching any sort of mass storage device to their computers, making it impossible for the employees to make personal backups.
I've never had a problem with this, since the files on my work machine were never more important to me than they were to my employers. If they want to delete them (intentionally or otherwise), I'm fine with it.
Anyone who trusts someone else's computer for anything important to them is foolish.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 21 2021, @06:39AM (1 child)
There was a job I had where the admin wanted to control developer desktops like that, as if we were sales, or accounting or whatever. Developers always had more latitude to crash the s*** out of or boxes, but he was pushing for some kind of standard configuration that could be pushed and updated whenever, etc. I left before anything came of it.
(Score: 2) by NateMich on Sunday March 21 2021, @01:56PM
This exact thing was being rolled out at my last job and directly contributed to my leaving also. We were being forced onto Fedora (because it was someone's favorite) and no admin rights. The guys in charge of it were almost impossible to reach when there was a problem. There were plenty of problems.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday March 21 2021, @09:33AM (5 children)
Place I used to work, which was riddled with students, would reimage all their PCs overnight to make sure everyone had a new, clean install no matter what the previous person who used it had done to it. This sounds a bit like that, but with something going wrong somewhere...
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday March 21 2021, @01:00PM
That was at least predictable. It wouldn't take long before you knew you had to keep your own copy of anything that mattered.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 21 2021, @01:17PM (3 children)
Not my story, but from very happy coworkers: schedule an upgrade to Windows 7 for all desktops at the end of the workday, accidentally target "All Computers (TM)" instead of only the desktops, end up with many server machines rebooting into an unattended desktop installation. Luckily, not all machines failed because halfway through the imaging server also killed itself.
Took three days to restore everything, they first needed to build a new backup server to start recovery from backup...
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 22 2021, @05:52AM (2 children)
And this is why you run server operating systems on servers. WSUS doesn't allow you to push desktop Windows versions over server Windows versions like that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 22 2021, @08:49PM (1 child)
so GNU+Linux or BSDs then?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 22 2021, @09:14PM
No, BusyBox/Linux all the way.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Sunday March 21 2021, @02:48PM (5 children)
Always have your own backup copies somewhere you can get to them fast. Also, don't trust colleagues. The SCM system is not for backup. Don't let them check in code that doesn't compile simply because they can't be bothered to keep a proper backup, or because the corporate system is inadequate.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday March 22 2021, @11:33AM (4 children)
> The SCM system is not for backup
Use a DVCS like git and then this is not a problem. Everyone gets their own fork or branch.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Monday March 22 2021, @10:19PM (3 children)
Doesn't stop people from pushing broken code upstream for "backup" though.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday March 23 2021, @11:36AM (2 children)
Sure, then the only solution is wet work.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday March 23 2021, @01:11PM (1 child)
What's wet work?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Informative) by PiMuNu on Tuesday March 23 2021, @02:50PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetwork [wikipedia.org]