OIT error

Friday afternoon, a remote hard drive imaging program upgrade implemented by the Office of Information Technologies was inadvertently applied to more computers than necessary, which resulted in data loss on roughly 400 hard drives.

 “Potentially 400 computers were impacted, mostly classroom and lab computers,” said Sharon Blanton, chief information officer for the Office of Information Technologies.

Most of the computers were repaired before the end of the weekend, she said.

There are roughly 165 computers used by faculty and staff that are still being investigated, Blanton said.

“Some of those computers have turned out to be fine,” she said.

Jahed Sukhun, director of OIT, put the impacted number of faculty and staff computers at 170 or 180.

“We may be able to give affected faculty and staff a new computer to work with while we attempt to recover missing data, but they will not have access to their data right away,” he said.

Sukhun said that OIT staff has been putting long hours into the lengthy recovery process.

To retrieve data on impacted hard drives, OIT must remove the hard drive and use data recovery tools to see if the information that was once there is still accessible. In some cases, it is not possible to recover data.

“About 15 of the 170 or 180 computers impacted that belong to faculty and staff were unaffected,” Sukhun said.

Since some faculty members were still in their offices when the upgrade error in was discovered, OIT was able to contact them to tell them to unplug their computers to prevent damage.
“I haven’t finished the list of computers yet,” Sukhun said.

OIT expects the situation to be fully resolved close to the end of the week. The numbers of affected computers is expected to change as OIT examines more computers.