my job made me sob–what a yob!
December 25, 2006
“Hi, my name is Patrick and I’m a guy-who-doesn’t-implement-enough-redundancy-in-his-back-up-routine-oholic. It’s been 11 hours since my last slip.”
Only 2 weeks ago I had to reinstall the OS on the teacher computer in my lab. Before doing so, I asked the room “technician” to open up one of the network drive’s permission to allow me to back up my data. He told me “Just put your stuff in a folder on the desktop and I’ll take care of it.”
OK.
I reinstalled XP, and then copied my back up folder from the network onto the local hardrive. This data is the culmination of 4 years and 3 teacher’s worth of hours of scouring the net for appropriate sites, CALL exercises and some outstanding student projects to be published on our site. It’s not all that huge–about 160 Megs–but it represents A LOT of work. Backing it up is a cake walk.
Only minutes after the re-install 2 weeks ago, upon installing anti virus software, it had already been infected by a dozen critters. Turns out our class server (which drives the Compass Learning system) was also infected and they were just reinfecting each other. So, that had to be dealt with.
This morning,”tech-boy” says, “hey, don’t turn on the teacher computer cuz it’s infected. I am going to reinstall windows.”
OK.
After he was all done, I opened the network drive where my back up was supposed to be…
Without the slightest hint of embarrassment (that I could detect), the lad says, “Oh, I delete last week.” Since it was deleted to the Network trash, it’s no longer there and unrecoverable.
I wanna breakie techie neckie.
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January 16th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
I’m a computer guy for Indiana University School of Medicine, Department of Ophthalmology (sorry, blatant plug
and what I suggest to people at work is to get one of those USB keychain drives and stick their work on that instead of a disk. Granted, most of them work on their papers and presentations at home, and use them to transfer files back and forth. If you only store files on it (such as Word docs, Powerpoint presentations, etc) then they also make great backups.
Granted, it doesn’t help you now, but keep it in mind for future reference.
BTW, I found your site via Michael Turton’s website re: Junior HS job. I’m not looking for a job yet, but I just started work on my MA in English with a concentration in TESOL.