Aurich Lawson | Getty Images
Last Friday, IT staff at Victoria University of Wellington launched a maintenance process aimed at reclaiming space in the university network – in theory by removing the profiles of students who no longer visit the university. Unfortunately, the real impact was much greater – affecting students, faculties and staff across the university.
The University of New Zealand’s student newspaper reported this issue fairly thoroughly, albeit from a non-IT perspective. It sounds like an overzealous Active Directory policy has gone out of bounds – the University’s Digital Solutions Division (which most places would call Information Technology or IT) has stated that files stored on the university network, or on Microsoft ‘s OneDrive cloud storage. , was “fully protected.”
A graduate student reported that not only “files on the desktop are gone”, but “my entire computer has also been restored”, which is equivalent to an AD operation to remove her user profile from the machine – in such a case user would be able to log in to the computer, but in a completely “clean” profile that looked brand new.
The same student reported that some PhD students lost a year of data, were only stored on their local computers, and were wiped out by the faulty maintenance procedure. For the Aryans who do not work on IT themselves, here is a lesson – be careful where and how you store your data.
It is unclear whether the university accidentally deleted user files on its network disks, but even if it does, there is a very strong, reasonable expectation that there will be regular and complete backups of the stations. There is no such expectation for the local disk on a user’s computer or laptop – if the only place you’ve stored it is your own C: disk, it’s almost certainly the only place it exists.
For routine data, it is sufficient to understand the policy of the company on what is or is not backed up and to store your data accordingly. For items of very important personal importance – such as a dissertation from a PhD student – it is unwise to rely entirely on the IT department to protect the data in the first place. There is no substitute for taking responsibility for your own data and keeping regular, tested backups.