Have you ever reformatted a computer and then immediately realized you shouldn’t have? Well, an “accident” at Emory University this week will make your mistake look like a brilliant, carefully considered decision.

Here’s the crux of what happened:

A Windows 7 deployment image was accidently sent to all Windows machines, including laptops, desktops, and even servers. This image started with a repartition/reformat set of tasks. 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.

What did we learn today? Always backup. Backup everything. Everything always.

➤ Windows 7 incident

See also – This is the funniest Windows error message you’ve ever seen and Facebook Engineer accidentally blocks photosharing site imgur, apologises in true Reddit fashion

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