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Comment by onli | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> You'd expect a IT setup by a professional university to have redundant backups for you

They very likely do. On the M: and Z: drive.

As far as I can see this is just IT saying “if you stored your data somewhere you shouldn’t have, it’s now gone”.

But of course they can’t say that, so instead they have to help people recover from their mistake.

Or maybe the mistake was thinking people would actually do what you told them instead of whatever was more convenient.

> As far as I can see this is just IT saying “if you stored your data somewhere you shouldn’t have, it’s now gone”.

You're assuming people are aware of where they — or their niche specialty software packages — store their data. I'm not even sure I'd know where e.g. some biotech-DNA-analysis-package stores its data.

And this is why computer literacy is important. I can't fathom not knowing where the stuff I put tens and hundreds of hours into is saved. And this is despite the fact I never really lost any critical data in my life - backups offline and offline, on site and off site.

Recently I've been given incredible abuse by my ex who accused me I took her external HDD when I moved out. I actually considered I did and scoured all my boxes and belongings and even invited her over to search herself. Meanwhile, I asked her if she had any backups.

Needless to say the abuse tripled. I never found the drive.

You're right, but not even VUW's professional IT department is computer-literate, so how cna the students and faculty been held to a higher standard?

Slightly off-topic, but I'm sorry you were subjected to that abuse. It's not ok.

I don’t know, if I were writing my thesis on a machine, I’d very much want to know where it’s stored, and not just trust the awesomeness.

Any shared network drives can protect critical documents, but I would expect that many people in the university have critical data for which those drives are simply unusable - can they put a 20gb experimental dataset they have gathered for analysis on that drive due to quotas, and if they can, would it have reasonable performance?

20GB? That's $20/yr Google Drive / Dropbox / whatever, synced from local disk. And a $7 USB key cold storage.

> "And a $7 USB key cold storage."

Which is actually not safe for cold storage in any way, shape, or form. Cheap flash storage devices are optimized for minimum cost per bit stored, not long-term data retention.

I agree that there are solutions available at a reasonable cost, but the question is why this organization appararently did not implement any of these solutions, and will they do it after this incident.

Not "it's gone", but "we wrote and ran software that invaded your computer and destroyed it".

Why didn't IT use their powers to deploy a backup program before they deployed a deletion program?

Thought expermiment: what wuodt happen if a student accidently deleted school's files, instead of the reverse? Criminal penalties? Civil penalties?

we wrote and ran software that invaded your computer and destroyed it

Were these personal laptops, or university provided? The fact they have H: and M: drives mounted suggests the latter.

I've never seen that. The only moment I needed a university backup was when a university unit specialized in IT (making websites, databases...) lost 3 months of work on a system they were managing and that we needed to migrate from (to get rid of them and their incompetence). The deal was for them to give us the data on that day, theu just nuked the db, and recycled the hard drives. There were supposedly backups University wide, so I just asked the service handling it (another one) to send me the backups. Thats when they discovered that no backup worked for the last few months for the whole university... Don't ever trust your university with data. Make yourself multiple backups, encrypt them and keep a copy of the key/password in a safe place. I have horror stories linked to each of these reasons. One fun one was the single backup that was plugged when a user opened a "fedex" email and got a cryptolocker that locked all the network drives and the backup. Thankfully the person managing the networked drives had off site backups (and archiving).

> Don't ever trust your university with data. Make yourself multiple backups

More generally: make sure you DR plan, even the simple "I have a backup" one that most people use, involves a second provider (which in some circumstances is your own local resources).

Even if the people keeping your data safe on a daily basis are entirely competent, bad things can happen and with centralised control they can happen to many people at once. Even if all the data can be restored you may not be a priority so if you need urgent access to the data having on off-provider copy you can take it from is a godsend.

Of course in a commercial setting or some university/research settings, maintaining an off-provider copy of any data may be a _massive_ policy breach. Or even a legal problem is it involves personal or other sensitive data.

> it must be hard for students to know how qualified the IT department of their university is.

The trick is to look at the most productive research groups, in terms of funding and output, and see if they use the resources from the IT department or not.

You can't expect that,I'm afraid. We have tens of millions of people using all sorts of 'in the cloud' thinking it's as safe, as it can possibly be. Same principle in this case. I do agree on the quality of the uni staff thought.

TFA also talks about data stored in locally installed software; lots of scientific software I've seen puts data in a default location and you have to go out of your way to know where it is on disk.

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