[HN Gopher] VUW Accidentally Wipes Desktop Computers
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VUW Accidentally Wipes Desktop Computers
Author : podiki
Score : 12 points
Date : 2021-03-20 21:44 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.critic.co.nz)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.critic.co.nz)
| analog31 wrote:
| Everybody I know who works at a university has a personal rule
| which is, never let the IT department touch an important
| computer.
|
| The workers are "required" to buy their own computers anyway, so
| it's not like the university has any say over how the computers
| are managed.
|
| Everybody has a story about IT ruining their computer by
| installing some sort of unworkable security software. There's
| also a familiar story of IT coming in and wiping out a computer
| that runs some ancient scientific instrument that isn't supported
| by its vendor any more. And the vendor kindly sending them an
| unofficial copy of the ancient software because, well, because
| it's happened before.
| irq wrote:
| Step 1 at any organization: uninstall the corporate spyware
| lmilcin wrote:
| Well... there are two types of people.
|
| Those who do backups and those who will...
|
| Seriously, I can't imaging doing something like research or
| writing PhD thesis and not having at least one off-site backup.
|
| Just get yourself couple of pendrives and rotate them somewhere
| else than where you live and work.
|
| I personally have more data. For my backup needs I use 3 4TB
| drives, a USB HDD docking station and a script to detect when one
| of the drives is inserted and make backup of data from all places
| in my home that I need backed up.
|
| I have one drive inserted in the station (once inserted, it will
| attempt one backup per day). One standing by or in transit and
| one with the family.
|
| At any point in time at least one of those drives is safe with my
| family which I visit regularly. When I drive there I yank the
| backup drive from the station, immediately replace it with the
| standby drive and take the fresh backup with me. When I am going
| back home, I take the one drive that was previously kept by my
| family to use it as a standby.
|
| It is not complicated, you can do the same with a pendrive.
|
| There is no paid software involved, I wrote the script over the
| years but it is simple and has no extra features. It only detects
| when the drive is inserted (each has a file with info), makes
| full/incremental backups (full backup automatically after
| inserted, incremental every night) and removes old backups and
| linked increments as needed. Restore is manual as files are just
| tar.
| universenz wrote:
| Not if your USB ports were disabled by Group Policy you can't.
| lmilcin wrote:
| I can't imagine students use computers with USB disabled but
| somebody with some experience may correct.
| onli wrote:
| To be fair, this is not data on your own PC or laptop where you
| know that the disk dies, the data is gone. You'd expect a IT
| setup by a professional university to have redundant backups
| for you, so that nothing could go wrong even if something
| breaks or gets deleted. But depends on the university of
| course, and it must be hard for students to know how qualified
| the IT department of their university is.
| [deleted]
| db48x wrote:
| Ouch; that's a nightmare situation. PhD students should be paying
| a dollar or two a month for off-site backups.
| hedora wrote:
| It sounds like the university was paying for centralized
| management/ backups, and this was the result.
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(page generated 2021-03-20 23:00 UTC)