A Single Point of Failure
29 04 2008
R.I.P Greenfield Server
I would like to express my deepest condolences to the teachers and staff of Greenfield Elementary in regards to your recent loss. For those of you who do not know, yesterday at about 12:00 the official word came down that the server was officially dead and all data was irretrievable. All documents that were saved in teachers’ home files (the Z Drive) & in the Classes 07-08 folder were lost. As you can imagine this was devastating news. While the cause of the death is inconclusive, it is believed that it may have been caused by an electrical surge during one of our recent storms. Teachers at RMMS know just how they feel! The also have suffered through a similar situation, and lost all of their data earlier in the year. Click on the above link to view another perspective on similar events. The events leading to the demise of this server could not have been predicted or avoided, and just like other “natural” disasters no one is to blame. But I ask you to take time to reflect and ask , “What can we learn from these events?
As I talked to Leah about the events of the day, we recalled a blog entry that seemed to sum it up, “Never Rely on Any Single Point of Failure” . A single point of failure is anything that, if it fails, then whatever you are doing is dramatically or fatally hindered. Here is my advice. Our servers are on most days very reliable and relatively safe place to store documents. But if you choose to only save to the server and something happens to the data then you have relied on a single point of failure. It is good practice to back up your files to another location in addition to the server. Some possible alternative locations are flash drives, CDs, or the D drive on one machine in your room. I have to admit that this is something that I need to work on also! In the next few weeks, try to get in the habit at the end of each day or week to back up the files to an additional location. I know how hard each and everyone of you work on your documents and projects and would hate to see these items vanish into thin air.
We have done a poor job of telling teachers about back up. Everyone assumes there is a magic automated product that sweeps all content to some huge repository. It ain’t so. Critical student records and financial information get that kind of treatment, but not instructional content. The irony is that each teacher has a very large volume of space on their own computer. Just dragging their classes folder down to their own workstation every once and a while would have taken care of the whole mess. Backup is and always be a personal habit, not an automated technical process..
Thanks for the comment, Mike on such an important topic. I hope were are all taking steps to be more proactive in our “back-up” habit.
I did some organizing of my files, well actually, I just cleaned off my desktop! But I really need to get on with the business of backing up my files!