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Forgive my beginner question: Since a reformat was done to the affected machines, does this mean that researchers' datasets, drafts of papers, and other IP wer

Forgive my beginner question: Since a reformat was done to the affected machines, does this mean that researchers' datasets, drafts of papers, and other IP were lost? Or were researchers' machines not affected?

InclinedPlane 12y ago
Deletion and formatting doesn't necessarily destroy data, it just destroys the pointers to the data. If they're lucky the data can be recovered via software utilities (undelete) with backfill from backups. If they're unlucky then important and un-backedup data has been written over, and those people are going to be SoL.
- johnchristopher 12y ago
  Are there actual backup procedures out there that foresee and automate the restoration of wiped drives and partitions ? I might be wrong bu I doubt it should even be considered though.
  - fyrabanks 12y ago
    Yes, there are a lot of options, both commercial and non-commercial, for full drive backups (then you restore the using those and the incrementals). Do that for your provisioning servers and you can redeploy a lot of the infrastructure based on that.
    - johnchristopher 12y ago
      I see, Thank you. Somehow I was under the impression that automating and scaling the tedious work of analyzing and restoring boot sectors and the like couldn't be done. I suppose that it's easier to plan for though if you restore a whole drive from a backup image rather than restoring a random set of files by going on a sector hunt ?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
wtallis 12y ago
In my experience with campus networks, home directories are never stored locally on any remotely-administered machines. Any specially-configured researcher's machine that stored data locally would not have been subscribed to get the automatically deployed OS images.
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  >"As soon as the accident was discovered, the SCCM server was powered off – however, by that time, the SCCM server itself had been repartitioned and reformatted." // If the SCCM server was pushed the "update" then there doesn't seem much hope for other machines? Surely no rule should be able to format the server running the ruleset; seems like a failsafe failure there at least.
  - wtallis 12y ago
    None of the storage servers should have been storing the user data on the same volume as the OS the way a client machine would. So the network-mounted home directories should be intact and ready to use once the server OS is reinstalled. And while I don't know how SCCM works, I'd be surprised if this image push was affecting anything other than the primary physical drive (a wipe-all, populate-one recipe would be too obviously wrong and dangerous, right?).

InclinedPlane 12y ago

Deletion and formatting doesn't necessarily destroy data, it just destroys the pointers to the data. If they're lucky the data can be recovered via software utilities (undelete) with backfill from backups. If they're unlucky then important and un-backedup data has been written over, and those people are going to be SoL.

johnchristopher 12y ago
Are there actual backup procedures out there that foresee and automate the restoration of wiped drives and partitions ? I might be wrong bu I doubt it should even be considered though.
- fyrabanks 12y ago
  Yes, there are a lot of options, both commercial and non-commercial, for full drive backups (then you restore the using those and the incrementals). Do that for your provisioning servers and you can redeploy a lot of the infrastructure based on that.
  - johnchristopher 12y ago
    I see, Thank you. Somehow I was under the impression that automating and scaling the tedious work of analyzing and restoring boot sectors and the like couldn't be done. I suppose that it's easier to plan for though if you restore a whole drive from a backup image rather than restoring a random set of files by going on a sector hunt ?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

wtallis 12y ago

In my experience with campus networks, home directories are never stored locally on any remotely-administered machines. Any specially-configured researcher's machine that stored data locally would not have been subscribed to get the automatically deployed OS images.

pbhjpbhj 12y ago
>"As soon as the accident was discovered, the SCCM server was powered off – however, by that time, the SCCM server itself had been repartitioned and reformatted." // If the SCCM server was pushed the "update" then there doesn't seem much hope for other machines? Surely no rule should be able to format the server running the ruleset; seems like a failsafe failure there at least.
- wtallis 12y ago
  None of the storage servers should have been storing the user data on the same volume as the OS the way a client machine would. So the network-mounted home directories should be intact and ready to use once the server OS is reinstalled. And while I don't know how SCCM works, I'd be surprised if this image push was affecting anything other than the primary physical drive (a wipe-all, populate-one recipe would be too obviously wrong and dangerous, right?).