can a hacker undelete files? Options

[Serbitar]

[Kesslan]

Personally I dont argue why something is permently deleted in SR when you go to the data and say.. YOU DIE NOW! and the data goes *AIIEE!!* and dies.

What of course I do question, is why the hell the corp has no backups? Of course some GMs I've played under very much take this into consideration and I've had more than afew 'simple' runs go bad because we thought the security footage was kept onsight, and it may well have been, but it was also at the same time transmitting to a secondary backup site that was guarded like fort knox.

Of course if you want to handle it all easily you can just work under the assumption that the center your characters are hitting is simply the last remaining bastion of that stored data and the J is hring you to take it out. Or that it's just one of several and he's hired others to hit the other sites the same day. Or maybe he's infact hiring you to hit all the locations, you infact see some of this in the SR3 souce/adventure books.

I'm sure alot of stuff is ultimately just ignored etc since it would really be far too complex to worry about, and far simpler and overall fun for the average gamer to just ignore all these little tiny details. Otherwise you wind up with a super detailed system that hardly anyone understands. SR3 sort of suffered from this, between special rules for vehicles, magic, matrix and standard combat. I've found it's very common to run across people (And hey I'm one of those) who's knowledge of a certain area of rules is hazy at best, and totally non existant at worst (For me it's with some of the magic rules I'm -still- hazy about with SR3)

SR4 just basically goes and does what SR3 suggested GMs do and thats implement a quick and dirty matrix/rigger set of tests to handle the day to day tabletop interaction so that hacking that maglock via the matrix doesnt take 1 hour to do, and instead represetns X ammount of time in game world, and is handled quick and dirty via a simple test (With advanced rules to come out later for those that want them)

[Rotbart van Dain...]

[KarmaInferno]

I'd add modifiers for the amount of time between deletion and recovery.

The longer you wait the more chance the area will be overwritten randomly.

Conversely if you engage recovery just seconds after the delete there should be a very good chance of recovering most of the file.


-karma

[hobgoblin]

about data destruction missions:

it could also be that what the J is doing isn't trying to force a permanent loss of R&D, but a setback so that his employer can then get a product to market first.

and a data destruction is so much cleaner then a firebombing or similar, as if its done right cant be seen as a criminal action at first glance.

[Blog]

Cause if there wasnt a way to 'win' it wouldnt be a fun game.

But yea IRL. There is undelete, backups galore, redundancy.

in SR memory is rather cheap, so I can see 'portable drives' locked in a firesafe somewhere. Heck my backups are a collection of Tapes, DVD, CD, USB sticks, disconnected harddrives.

But how fun would that be in the game if all your work would mean nothing. So lets stretch reality a little bit.

Or look at it this way. Lets say that normal deletes (by general uses) do have a trash can of sorts where undelete can happen. However when a hacker wants that file dead. Its not only a deletion, but some additional countermeasures to 'search and destroy' all copies when they are accessed.

[hobgoblin]

[ShadowDragon8685]

[Kesslan]

[Moon-Hawk]

Well, yeah, but, I've never had a Johnson who didn't say "Destroy all copies of X files" for this very reason. The only time the above situation should come up is if the Johnson is a total n00b. Which I freely admit will happen sometimes, but in that case he's hardly in a position of trashing the runners, what with him being a total n00b and all. :-)

[Butterblume]

[Moon-Hawk]

[Konsaki]

If the johnson left such open ended objectives and pulled that crap of pulling out a chip with the info to deny payment, he would get a bullet in the brain or something to that effect... Problem with open ended objectives like that is it would be akin to saying plant enough trees until you stop global warming...
Negotiation rolls should be factored in to keeping the Johnson from pulling shit like that...

[Rotbart van Dain...]

[Drraagh]

May be a little off topic, and also ressurecting a dead horse as it were, but I just stumbled on this and had an interesting thought.

I worked for this one company that backed up their data in two locations; once daily to a secondary system and once weekly to a secure off-site system. So, if their main backup went down, they only lost a few days work. However, there was one guy who would print out any changes he did as well, just in case the worst happened and he lost something important.

Now, what I can see happening in Shadowrun is a decker deleting all traces of a file (perhaps the delete command does deleting that instance and then goes recursive to try and find other copies. Sort of like the rm -rf unix joke, though not as deadly). So, now the company is left with no backups since they lost everything. However, you've got some guy who printed off some relevant parts of the information. Just imagine having to re-enter that. You'ld either be moving page by page over OCR or entering it by hand. :P However, it would make a good backup system, though it would take time to recover so corps would fall behind.

[hobgoblin]

rm -rf would only be deadly if followed by a /. and if done inside someones brain...

thats all iirc btw...