Our university allows you to save stuff, but the stuff is all deleted every night. That works for everyone, it seems. I don’t know if they have something that automatically deletes everything nightly or if everything has to be done manually, but it seems unecessary to not allow stuff to be saved at all. Than again, I’m a Humanities student, so I am largely ignorant in these matters.
I still can’t figure out how this policy makes the computer “unusable.” Everything that you used to be able to do on the hard drive, you can do on a portable USB drive, plus the latter gives the advantage of your data being portable and secure, unlike on an unsecured computer. No worries about someone accidentally saving over your file or being unable to work on it from another location. Put the drive on your keychain if it’s so inconvenient to deal with.
I could understand being miffed if it was your own work computer, but come on, you’re sharing this computer with lots of other people; this policy makes a lot of sense on their end for liability and convenience/maintenance reasons. It doesn’t matter if no one’s ever done X before, that’s not the point; they might in the future.
Killing zombie thread.