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KCL staff offered emotional support, clergy chat to help get over data loss

#PrayForKCL

Exclusive Staff at King's College London are now being offered counseling and prayers to help them get over the data loss suffered during October's catastrophic IT failure.

A month ago, departments across the university suffered “irretrievable data loss” when a 3PAR's one-fault-tolerant RAID Array kicked the bucket. Almost every system at the university, from payroll to shared drive access, went down during the incident. A week later the issue was still interrupting business, and continued to do so a fortnight post-borkage.

The Register has been following updates at KCL, including an email informing staff that regardless of the institution's previous failures, they were forbidden from making their own backups, which the university was now making itself using unspecified “new technology”.

The latest missive from management, which stresses it is “particularly mindful” of the personal impact of the data loss, is particularly mindfully beautiful.

Again seen by The Register, the missive informs staff that if they would like support in processing “the personal or emotional impact” of the data loss, then they should rest assured that their data has been discovered to be recoverable extra resources have been shunted at the university's counselling service.

“In addition,” the chirpy message adds: “The Chaplaincy offers a confidential listening service to all staff and students. The Chaplaincy has arranged two special drop-in sessions where people can either speak to a Chaplain 1:1, or share experiences with other people affected.”

#PrayForKCL

Considering recent global events the end of days may indeed be approaching, and while theology isn't our bread nor our butter at El Reg we reckon an argument could be made that this will bring with it some data recovery benefits.

Without such obvious divine intervention, some technical details on the “new technology” might do more to encourage faith among KCL's staff.

Alas, they have merely been told that IT Services has pressed ahead with the new back-up system which was going to replace the old one — and which in the actual act of replacing it, managed to destroy the backups — using “next generation technology”.

Staffers were informed: “It is now safe to save new work on all drives.”

Plug and pray, KCL. ®

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