Thursday, November 15, 2012

Thursday, November 15

Today, I spent today working on several issues in the morning. One, a users icons moved around on the desktop so we set them back to write. Another user needed help with some backup software. Bakup software failed, but I realized that the problem is the flash drive. The flash drive will only format ass fat 32. Because her back up is larger than four gigs, That 32 will not support her back up using that software. I will find another solution.

Most of the day was spent in the area technology Cordinator meeting. We discussed various things such as erate, common core state standards and the IT technology readiness survey, various applications for monitoring desktop software, and other useful utilities.
During lunch, we discussed several topics including new distance-learning equipment, and a co-op wide data backup program.

The discussion regarding the co-op ride back up data program continued want to return to the office. A group of us sat around and discussed the feasibility of rolling out off-site backup storage solution for each of the schools in the co-op area. We think now is the time to start looking at rolling out such a program.

I plan to contact one of the local fiber providers, in order to find out what it would take to set up a co-op wide system. The plan is to have storage facilities at the co-op, and provide connectivity to each of the schools so that they can do off-site backups to our facility. Ultimately, the program would expand to include other services provided by the co-op. The number one concern of course is going to be the cost out to the member districts who wish to put dissipate. Jeff Madlock had a great idea. He suggested that once we determine the overall cost the cost will then be divided out by the number Of students in the co-op area. Then, each district would participate based on their student enrollment. We believe this will be the most fair way to approach sharing the cost of data storage services. We will call in one of the vendor providers and have a discussion. Once we have that set up, and we have a better feel for costs, connectivity, and rollouts, we will have a meeting with the superintendents and see how they feel about the project.

It is possible that once this project is rolled out, other schools around the state could also piggyback in based on their student enrollment if they wish. Again, depending on costs, we may also look at providing redundant offsite backup services. This means that the co-op would take the back ups that they receive and send them off-site to a storage facility either in Missouri, Tennessee, or somewhere similar.

After the meeting, I was called into the early childhood office in order to help troubleshoot a data problem on a flash drive. Turns out, the flash drive was fine but the computer into which the drive had been plugged had gone bonkers. That's a technical term!

I got the computer back up and running I believe. In the meantime, I had managed to salvage seven of the 14 corrupted files. As it turned out, four of the files that were corrupted actually existed on another computer. Therefore there were only three documents that were truly unrecoverable. After talking with the user of the bunkered computer, it turns out that those were the three files but that user was working on after the computer had started acting up.

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