you own a macintosh - the file is fucking gone.

[guinevere33.livejournal.com]

Working as a self-appointed sysadmin in my lab definitely has its disadvantages. Such as it taking 3 months to wring the admin password for the macs out of the old tech who left for greener pastures back in January. Having finally acquired said password, I set out to straighten out the computer lab. This started with deleting all the unused user accounts, some of which belong to employees who haven't been here for over 3 years, and setting up proper general guest accounts.

As I'm doing this, I was seated next to a new hire I'll call D, who was working on another machine. I mention that I'm going through deleting all the unused accounts. "Oh good, could you make accounts for me on those machines? I don't have one yet." Sure, I said, and got him all fixed up. We kept chatting about what a disgrace the computers were, and how I hoped no one had any important data saved on these ancient accounts - if so, I had no sympathy, but I was backing up all the real users just in case (including an admin account named "Bilbo Baggins").

A good hour later, D thinks to mention that by the way - ALL HIS DATA are stored on the desktop of the G4 "guest" account. Which I had summarily deleted beyond retrieval quite some time before. "Is there any way you could get that back?"

:: beats head against desk ::


P.S. I should also mention that this computer has an external backup hard drive and has software installed that should back up all user accounts on a regular basis. Alas, this would not work to retrieve D's data because the external HD? was OFF.

Comments

[mouser.livejournal.com]

Welcome, fellow sheep.

Why sheep you ask?

Because we're ALL flocked!

[kizayaen.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, but having an on/off switch on a HARD DRIVE is failure at design.

You should not have ON and OFF as options. You should have PLUGGED IN and NOT PLUGGED IN.

[combat-taco.livejournal.com]

I recommend Data Rescue 2 if he reallllllllly needs it. And yeah 5 minutes to l33t hax the pword ;p

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

+1, Data Rescue is *good* for data extraction, especially in those situations where there might be neither a stable OS nor a clean directory to depend on. :)

Just don't reset the "System Administrator" password. That's root, and you break bad stuff when you reset it from there ..

[japester.livejournal.com]

just don't enable it. never. you don't need it on workstations.
sudo is your friend.
and sudo sh is your best friend

[guinevere33.livejournal.com]

Yay, that's what the help desk folks brought with them. ITS is generally worthless, but at least they do own backup software. Although my original conversation with them went like this:

Me: I need to recover data from a deleted mac user account. Yes, I clicked "delete immediately".
Them: Oh. Um. Yeah, I don't think we can get that back.
Me: I'm looking at the Apple website right now and it says in big letters that 3rd party software can be used to recover this type of data.
Them: Oh. Um. I don't think we have any of that. But I can check. *puts me on hold*
Them: *3 minutes later* So there's a guy here who says he has this thing called Disk Warrior? I guess we can try that?
Me: Please do :P

[kuang.livejournal.com]

Disk Warrior will make you its bitch. It rules on so many levels I'm almost getting teary thinking about it, and it's saved me on more than a few occasions :)

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

Well, undelete is of exponentially decreasing value with increasing runtime since the file (now unallocated space sitting there waiting to be overwritten by new file data) will rot rather quickly after it's deleted. Which is why undelete utilities are neither a guarantee nor a particularly good thing to rely on.

That being said, being able to reallocate the file and get back .. well .. *most* of the original content can sometimes be better than nothing. :D

(Anyone thought of binding those stations to an Open Directory master, or maybe diskless-netbooting them and handling authentication and user data storage on a server machine? With a decent RAID? Kind of hard to leave those turned off by accident, and also kind of hard to lose user data by accident .. :)

[guinevere33.livejournal.com]

You DO realize that all you need to do is pop in the original Mac OS CD to reset the admin password, yes?

Hey, you learn something every day! Despite the fact that the lab is very Mac heavy, none of us tech-oriented folk know the first thing about them. The "senior tech" acts like he's allergic every time one of them has a minor glitch - wouldn't even try to upgrade Adobe Acrobat. So here I am, learning on the fly. Joy.

Not that we'd probably be able to FIND the original OS CD around here, seeing as when I opened the box for the backup software, the CDs were long gone...

[peace873.livejournal.com]

Mac OS X is actually very nice. That said, it is completely ridiculous to try to support a heterogeneous environment. I have this very same problem. Probably 95% of the machines I support are Windows, and then there are the few Macs (some OS 9, BTW) and they drive me nuts because they are not compatible with the rest of the infrastructure and almost no one knows how to use them. I certainly do not.

I'm so sick of people telling me that the like Mac because it is easy to use... when it is completely clear that they don't know how to use it.

It's an economic issue. The cost of supporting 2 operating systems is probably 1.5 times what it costs to support 1 operating system with the same number of computers. And, at this point in history, there is nothing you can accomplish with Foo OS that you can't accomplish with Bar OS.