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I'd say this person is actually lucky Windows forced an update. Compute nodes fail, which is why you log state so you can restore your simulation or training routine. Instead of experiencing a failure in industry, they learned the "cache state" lesson in a low-stakes academic setting. Maybe they'll extrapolate the lesson and start keeping off-site backups too.

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Well this is not applicable to all scenarios/available hardware. We don't even know what the computation was and how powerful a machine he had access to

But of course I agree, if you can, you should

If you have enough ram to keep the current state of your computation, you probably have enough disk to push it to, several times over (for obvious reasons, you should never overwrite your latest snapshot with the most current data). If your computation was on a self-managed windows version, you definitely have enough disk.

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