Foiling the Mini-Zip computer virus
Archived article from Jan 21, 2000
By Douglas Frank
On Dec. 2, the infamous Mini-Zip virus struck Rutgers' offices of accounting and student services.
It entered both systems through individual PCs, where it destroyed not only the files on the PCs but also more than 500 files on each of the servers.
It turned out to be the disaster that wasn't. The day was saved by an automatic backup service (ADSM) that Administrative Computing Services (ACS) was piloting in the Administrative Services Building (ASB).
In ASB, all the major servers and many of the desktops in undergraduate admissions, accounting, scheduling and ACS are backed up nightly to the mainframe. The data is then rotated through the tape library and sent off-site for storage
The backup service allowed the files to be completely restored in less than a day.
"This virus had the potential for causing a major disaster if it hadn't been for the automatic backup service," according to Bernice Ginder, university director of administrative information systems and planning. "Although we've had many small situations where the backup service has saved a department from losing data, this is the first major disaster that's been avoided thanks to this new service."
The two-year pilot is over, said Ginder, and ACS is finishing up a recommendation on options for scaling up ADSM as a university-wide service.
"The recent incidents underscored the value in having this type of automatic backup service readily available for departments," added Ginder.
Her remarks were echoed by Terry Wooding, assistant controller, student financial services, who noted that the backup process "greatly helped my office, because it would have taken days and many hours of lost productivity from our 20 staff members to recover the more than 500 files that had been lost due to the virus. I feel that the product is so good that we should make it available to all university departments."
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