Re: Evansville Indiana Vanderburgh School Corporation

I think the really relevant information is the phrase "backup configuration settings." It's a really basic concept. If you don't back up data, you can lose data. It sounds like they could use some education in proper backup strategy.

It's interesting the subject of the original message is: "Indiana school district wipes out high school grades." That's accurate. The school district wiped out the grades by failing to do proper backups. Years ago, I worked for a company and was responsible for backups. I managed to save all the user's data, but I missed backing up the system configuration and security information. After we got the system restored, it took a week or so to get the configuration back where it belonged. I also implemented a better backup strategy. Yes, my problems were caused by a hardware failure, but I didn't blame any of the resulting troubles on the hardware. It was my fault. Any hardware can fail, but and AS/400 or iSeries or System i or Power system (did I get all the names?) experiences them less often than some other platforms.


midrange-nontech-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote on 04/10/2008 09:56:42 AM:

----- Message from Al Mac Wheel <macwheel99@xxxxxxxxxx> on Wed, 09 Apr 2008 21:15:28 -0500 -----

To:

starbase_club@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

cc:

midrange-nontech@xxxxxxxxxxxx

Subject:

Evansville Indiana Vanderburgh School Corporation

Subject: Indiana school district wipes out high school grades

in [RISKS] Risks Digest 25.11
This issue is archived at <http://www.risks.org> as
<http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/25.11.html>
The current issue can be found at
<http://www.csl.sri.com/users/risko/risks.txt>

>from the school's website of Evansville, Indiana

"... The Evansville Vanderburgh School Corporation recently experienced

a

hardware malfunction with its AS400 computer server resulting in a loss

of

student grades...

" Following scheduled maintenance on March 27, 2008, disk errors

occurred.

After working with IBM engineers around the clock to mitigate data

loss, the

engineers determined that due to an unfortunate and very rare

combination of

hardware problems and backup configuration settings, all student grade

book

assignment data for the current grading period is no longer in the
system. Harrison, North and Bosse High Schools and Harwood Middle

School -

all on the six-week grading period - lost four weeks of individual
assignment grades that had been posted."