Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience with campus networks, home directories are never stored locally on any remotely-administered machines. Any specially-configured researcher's machine that stored data locally would not have been subscribed to get the automatically deployed OS images.
>" As soon as the accident was discovered, the SCCM server was powered off – however, by that time, the SCCM server itself had been repartitioned and reformatted. " // If the SCCM server was pushed the "update" then there doesn't seem much hope for other machines? Surely no rule should be able to format the server running the ruleset; seems like a failsafe failure there at least.
None of the storage servers should have been storing the user data on the same volume as the OS the way a client machine would. So the network-mounted home directories should be intact and ready to use once the server OS is reinstalled. And while I don't know how SCCM works, I'd be surprised if this image push was affecting anything other than the primary physical drive (a wipe-all, populate-one recipe would be too obviously wrong and dangerous, right?).