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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: 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.