I’m comfortable holding PhD students to a higher standard. I sympathize with the amount of work ahead of these students, but I don’t accept any blame except on themselves.
Some students and staff likely use specialised (often very very expensive) software that locally process gigabytes of data, e.g. in the fields of biology and chemistry. These datasets or simulations will be in proprietary formats buried deep in some folder somewhere or in an even more inaccessible database hidden from the user. The PCs in question could also be physically tied to hardware systems in a lab. They're not going to expect that machine to be randomly wiped while working on the data, possibly for weeks at a time. They don't know where the data is. At best they might export the data (a feature which probably doesn't exist for most programs) and archive it at the end of their project. This IT screwup will hurt them a lot.
If film students can do this (and they do; I knew some in school), I think a scientist can be expected to.
Start with an elderly IT system where your network drive quota is about 5% the size of your laptop's hard drive.
Then imagine someone in (for example) a psychology department where they've got ethical obligations towards data security for things like survey results and medical data - so USB hard drives are not officially endorsed.
Then imagine the department is fragmented into labs and groups and people pursuing their own lines of research, so while some research groups in the department have lucked into having someone IT literate enough to get hold of a NAS or sort out backblaze accounts for everyone, others haven't.
During crunch weeks it's not uncommon for students to log 16+ hours a day on the computer, keeping up with heavy workloads.
Anyone who claims that it's okay for a specialized industry professional to be ignorant about (very) basic computer use is absolutely wrong; it applies to all fields either within the professional aspect, or at the very least during the learning process while slogging through college and the attached social networking.
We chastise the elderly for being unwilling or unable to learn to use and accept mobile phones, meanwhile current-generation students from non-cs fields are having trouble with the very basics of computer use, made all the worse by the fact that most modern colleges are by-and-large paperless and entirely reliant on the use of personal computers?
Great.
Ever since then I now backup and image the entire HDD and I have almost literally terrabytes of extra OS images "just in case" I forgot or lost something. Hasn't really happened yet. Except I still can't find my Bitcoin from 2010. Doh.