Just one month ago,
the small town and school district of West, Texas suffered a horrendous
tragedy, with the massive explosion that devastated much of the small town and
the West Independent School District. My
understanding is that the explosion devastated much of this district’s
technology infrastructure, servers, and backups. And just now it is being reported that a
lot of schools (and most likely their data) reside close to fertilizer storage
across the country. And unfortunately this
week in Oklahoma City, five schools
were ravaged by a horrendous tornado.
Data is unfortunately super easy to lose – if not to a major
natural or other disaster, then just as easily to a failed hard drive, a broken
water main, or a building fire. Whether
you are a technology director, superintendent, or a classroom teacher, this is
the perfect time to ask several questions, where are my files and systems
backed up? Are the backups stored in
different physical locations? Are the
backups in a secured location? Can the
backups be restored to a different place if needed?
All of us need to be backing up our important digital assets
(and our students’ assets.) Very few of
our schools sit somewhere immune to natural disasters. San Antonio is thought to be a very good
location in Texas much more immune to tornadoes and hurricanes than many parts
of the state, such that we have many
very large data centers here. Yet
the picture to the right is my son’s elementary school two years ago, with a major wildfire burning
right behind it. I am sure the staff of
the school never thought a fire would threaten them, yet it came so very close.
So before travelling down to San Antonio to ISTE, please take a few minutes
and backup your laptop, iPad, servers, etc. to
another site or perhaps to the cloud, lest some unfortunate disaster
strikes you or your school. Safe
travels.
