Students loosing 2 years and 1 week worth of data.
First, I want to clarify that I haven't personally experienced this issue, which makes it challenging for me to provide a detailed description of its cause. I'm part of the IT team at a university, and recently, we've encountered two incidents involving MacBooks losing data. The first case was about two weeks ago, and the most recent one was yesterday. Unfortunately, I lack a direct means of contacting these students unless I happen to see them in person, so I can't guarantee that I'll be able to offer any answers or updates.
Also my first language is not english so apologies if it reads terrible (As you can probably tell i have used chatgpt to help me) but i figured english would reach more people.
The reason I'm posting this is to see if anyone might know what to do if this happens again, along with my concern that it might affect my MacBook as well.
The first incident occurred about two weeks ago and involved a student who used her MacBook until the battery was completely drained. When she plugged it in and turned it back on, the MacBook had inexplicably rolled back in time by two years. All her files, documents, and other data displayed a last modification date of 2021. And her accounts had reverted to their previous states. Office was logged into her previous school account, and her browser was also logged into an older account. Fortunately, she had everything stored in iCloud, which allowed us to recover all of her data.
Yesterday, the second student came in with a similar problem. She had lost her exam notes, and it appeared that Word hadn't saved anything for a week. But after looking closer, we discovered that everything, from her open tabs in Chrome to her files, had reverted to the state they were in two weeks ago. Unfortunately, she had not saved any of her progress in iCloud or any other cloud storage. I wasn't able to solve it. She mentioned that this occurred a little after she started charging her MacBook. The screen went dark, and the MacBook restarted, opening in the state it's currently in.
Unfortunately, as I mentioned at the beginning, I have no means to contact them, so i cannot follow up on any suggestions, or try any possible solutions . However, in case I do encounter them or if someone else comes by with the same problem, I would like to be ready to offer assistance. Any response is greatly appreciated.
I have to assume the first student's MacBook is doing fine since she hasn't returned with it, and regrettably, I no longer remember the specs of her MacBook. So, I can only provide details on the second one, which is the more pressing problem.
- MacBook Air M1, 2020
- Base model
- Monterey 12.2.1
- No visible physical damage.
MacBook Air (M1, 2020)