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Printer-Friendly ModeDigital storage choices can curb data disasters
September 21, 2009 —
Kayla Martin has a horror story.
“I was up all night typing a paper at home, and at five in the morning my computer crashed and I lost it all,” said Martin, a literature junior. “Luckily, I’m a very fast typer and had just enough time to type it all up again.”
Allison Mc- Dougall, however, was not so fortunate. “I was working late on a paper, and when I hit save, the whole computer shut down and rebooted,” said the professional and technical writing senior. “Somehow, Windows got completely deleted, too. It turned out I had a bad memory chip.”
Data disasters aren’t limited to English majors. Writing plays a part in almost any student’s education, regardless of discipline – and that can make tales of last-minute mishaps all too common.
To help, there are many different methods of digital storage available to students, and backing up regularly can help make losing files a thing of the past.
“During every semester I have taught, at least one student has experienced catastrophic disk failure,” writes PTW professor Bill Williamson on his course Web page. Williamson advises all of his students to bring some form of backup device each day. He himself is known to carry multiple thumb drives whenever he comes to campus.
That practice is a good one, said Ken Schindler, executive director of Information Technology Services.
“Thumb drives are so cheap, and the price keeps coming down, so I’d recommend them,” he said. “But realize they get lost. They are only the size of a pen, and it’s not hard to lose a pen.”
Schindler encouraged students to use M-Drive, SVSU’s online storage system, as their first line of defense. With ten gigabytes of storage per student (more if an instructor requests), no physical device that can be lost or damaged, and free access from any Internet connection, it’s hard to beat, he said.
Schindler added that M-Drive is the safest and most reliable method available to students.
That may come as a surprise to students who have been frustrated by MDrive in the past. Martin, for example, said she could not access the system from home at all last semester.
Schindler agreed that M-Drive’s dubious reputation is well-deserved, stemming from recurring failures two years ago. But he emphasized that a lot has changed since then.
A grant allowed the University to buy a state-of-the-art mass storage unit and more efficient servers. Two servers operate simultaneously at a low capacity, and handle the same information, so that their workloads are shared.
“They’re redundant,” Schindler said. “If server one fails, server two has the capacity to carry everyone until we get the first one fixed.”
There are still limitations to the M-Drive. While it operates quickly on campus, home access can be slow and clunky, Schindler said, particularly for larger files such as graphic design and video projects.
The M-Drive has a drag-and-drop option for off-campus Windows users that improves speed and performance, but nothing yet for Macs.
“Of course, the students with the large graphic design files are the same ones that tend to be Mac users,” he said.
And outages still occur, as frequent e-mails to students from ITS show. Schindler emphasizes these outages are for necessary, scheduled upgrades and that unscheduled system crashes are a thing of the past.
“We’re up 99.9999 percent of the time,” he said. “Of course, those numbers don’t matter to you if you try to access us when we’re down.”
As for other storage methods besides M-Drive and thumb drives, Schindler said they can all be useful but that they all have drawbacks.
Storing important documents on e-mail or VSpace is not a good idea beyond the short term, he said. Documents stored on VSpace will only be retrievable as long as a student is enrolled in that course, usually only one semester. And ITS regularly clears out old e-mails from the V-Mail server – all unopened messages are deleted after 90 days, along with all mail more than 365 days old.
“Our e-mail system is very reliable, but it is a transaction system, not an archive system,” he said.
Like thumb drives, external hard drives are increasing in popularity as they become cheaper, and can be very useful for students who need to save a large number of graphics or video files. Yet they are fragile, as Schindler pointed out: “You drop it on the ground, and you’re out ninety bucks. At least with a thumb drive, you can run it through the laundry and it still works.”
So which method is the best?
“There is no perfect answer,” Schindler said. Each student has different space needs, different levels of online access to M-Drive, and different budgets for storage devices.
Schindler encourages multiple backups of important files, using at least two different storage methods.
“If you’ve worked hard on something, and your work is important, than why take a chance?”