Woman Mistakenly Believing She Was to Be Fired Deletes $2.5 Million of Computer Data
Florida: 41-year-old Marie Lupe Cooley has been charged with damage in excess of $1,000 to computers after she deleted $2.5 million worth of architectural drawings off the company server in the mistaken belief that she was about to be fired.
Cooley came to her conclusion after seeing a job advertisement from the company that matched her position. The vacancy was actually in her boss's wife's office. Following her destructive acts her job may well be advertised too.
The owner of the firm, Steven E. Hutchins, hired a consultant and had the deleted files restored for a fee he described to the media as "not a sensationalistic amount". Cooley has been freed on bail.
But they never do - All it really takes is the data to be written over once, then it's hard (or in most cases, impossible) to lift the data of a disk. Multiple passes are overkill as well: DOD 5223-22M is 3 passes, NSA is 7 passes and Guttman is 35 passes. If it's just been deleted, the OS places a ? mark at the beginning of a filename (or at least it used to for FAT32, NTFS differs by keeping better index structures and filenames for recovery) - there are programs that can toggle this back to the original filename. Even whole directory structures can be repaired and recovered. If the drive is damaged (Won't ID), then the drive needs to be sent away which is pricey. I'm always amazed at how many people say "My life depends on my computer", or "My whole business runs on it" and yet they *don't* have any backup of any of it and the machine is generally old and crappy. These are the same people who have no shortage of Plasma tv's , flash cars, etc, yet are puzzled why there $ 799 - 5 yr old Dell needs attention and should have money spent on it. I always say, "most people lose all their data only once."
what the woman did was good or anything, but she sorta did the company a favor...what company like that doesn't have fricken backup plans already in place? Who's running the IT dept?!
I actually live right here where that happened, and the owner of the architectural firm is a client of mine in another line of business. It was actually closer to 7 million in blueprints and working drawings. She saw an add in the paper for a job with her exact job description, with her bosses phone number, which led her to believe her job was in jeopardy.The actual listing was for her same position at his wife's new company.......
and have worked both in the private sector and the goverment. They all had some sort of backup data; from just copying them to another pc, to automated daybyday backup scripts. Also most companies use Content Management Systems which by default provided backup againts deletions or modifications.
It's hard to believe that a big architectural company doesn't have ANY backup system...it's just ridiculous.
Its all well and good backing up every day, but if you use a file, then come back to it a week later and find its gone/corrupt, the chances are your backup is also deleted/corrupted.
Unless you store dozens of complete disk images, which is a pretty hefty proposal, opr something changed in the past decade.
Right on the mark, I was about to say the same thing about deleting files... Once you empty the recycle bin, a good defrag will damn near make it impossible to recover. No need to 'zero' the cluster out, just defrag is all that's needed.
Well actually a lot of devices, such as tape drives, allow you to make incremental backups. That's where it only backs up files that have actually have changed. Saves time and space and if you discover that a file it corrupted, you have several different backups to choose from....
I use a 30 dollar program after I formated one of my drives by mistake, which had 160 gigs of info,, 10 hours later I recovered all plus other stuff I deleted months before.
I wouldn't want to be in her shoes anyway. That is a serious crime, let alone stupid. So what if she was going to be fired...Now she, for sure will receive a bad reference. lol Anyway in Florida the Cooley name is dirt!
