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Last Friday, the IT team at Victoria University of Wellington started a maintenance procedure with the aim of reclaiming space on the university’s network – in theory, removing the profiles of students who no longer attend the university. The real impact, unfortunately, was much greater – affecting students, teachers and staff across the university.
The student newspaper at the University of New Zealand reported the problem quite fully on Wednesday, albeit from a non-IT perspective. It seems that an overzealous Active Directory policy has gone out of bounds – the university’s Digital Solutions department (which most places would call Information Technology or IT) has declared that files stored on the university’s network drives or cloud storage Microsoft’s OneDrive, have been “fully protected”.
A graduate student reported that “not only files on the desktop were lost”, but “my entire computer was also restarted”, which would be consistent with an AD operation completely removing the user profile from the machine – in such a case , a user would be able to log in to the PC, but in a completely “clean” profile that looked like new from the factory.
The same student reported hearing that some doctoral students lost data for a year, saved only on their local computers and erased by the erroneous maintenance procedure. For those Arsians who don’t work with IT, there’s a lesson here – be careful where and how you save your data.
It is not clear whether the university accidentally deleted users’ files on its network drives – but even if it did, there is a very strong and reasonable expectation that these drives will be backed up regularly and completely. This expectation does not exist for the local drive on a user’s PC or laptop – if the only place you have saved is your own C: drive, it is almost certainly the only place where it exists.
For routine data, it is sufficient to understand the company policy on what is backed up and not to save your data accordingly. For items of significant personal importance – such as a doctoral student’s thesis – it is not advisable to rely entirely on the IT department to protect data in the first place. There is no substitute for taking responsibility for your own data and maintaining your own regular and tested backups.