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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: 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.