Thousands of student files lost in error(taipeitimes.com)
taipeitimes.com
Thousands of student files lost in error
https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2021/09/26/2003765032
6 comments
Funny that their solution isn't higher frequency backups but having someone watch it carefully to make sure it doesn't fail again. Maybe it's not really a serious problem. Only 2 weeks of data and student submitted data so it's probably mainly an inconvenience for the students to re-upload it.
This is extremely unfortunate, yet feels like it could have been prevented rather easily.
Most of the hypervisors support snapshotting of various types, many OSes out there have built in backup solutions, even some file systems support snapshots as well, that can be restored, everything from pooled file systems to even RAID could have helped them deal with the failure of a disk. And perhaps not applicable here, cloud vendors also support backups most of the time.
Though personally, even a simple software solution can help with backups, personally i use BackupPC: https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/
Basically, it's just some nice logic that's built around rsync and has compression, incremental backups etc. I set it up a few years ago for all of my cloud servers and VMs (which i manually add to the list of ones that are backed up), create system users for them for SSH access and occasionally check whether the incremental/full backups are working. Then, i simply have another rsync script that copies the backup server's data over periodically to another device.
It's not the most advanced setup, but even that is better than just hoping that no data loss will happen, which is plain wrong. Then there's also software solutions like https://bvckup2.com/ for desktops etc. Of course, rsync and cron would have also been sufficient.
It's not like backups aren't essentially a solved problem in most of the simple configurations.
Most of the hypervisors support snapshotting of various types, many OSes out there have built in backup solutions, even some file systems support snapshots as well, that can be restored, everything from pooled file systems to even RAID could have helped them deal with the failure of a disk. And perhaps not applicable here, cloud vendors also support backups most of the time.
Though personally, even a simple software solution can help with backups, personally i use BackupPC: https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/
Basically, it's just some nice logic that's built around rsync and has compression, incremental backups etc. I set it up a few years ago for all of my cloud servers and VMs (which i manually add to the list of ones that are backed up), create system users for them for SSH access and occasionally check whether the incremental/full backups are working. Then, i simply have another rsync script that copies the backup server's data over periodically to another device.
It's not the most advanced setup, but even that is better than just hoping that no data loss will happen, which is plain wrong. Then there's also software solutions like https://bvckup2.com/ for desktops etc. Of course, rsync and cron would have also been sufficient.
It's not like backups aren't essentially a solved problem in most of the simple configurations.
Reminder of backups 321:
3 copies, 2 locations, 1 offline (or something similar)
> Under a program introduced in 2019 for high-school students starting that year, students are to create portfolios to be used for university applications, which include their grades, extracurricular activities and other information related to their character and achievements.
They're not using entrance examinations? How did this happen?
They're not using entrance examinations? How did this happen?
the portfolios is only part of the overall record for application process. Education ministry also requires students take standard exams.
http://www.jbcrc.edu.tw/multi3.html
its in chinese, and I guess there is no (need) for english version because rich parent who speak English will send kids abroad to better colledges.
http://www.jbcrc.edu.tw/multi3.html
its in chinese, and I guess there is no (need) for english version because rich parent who speak English will send kids abroad to better colledges.
I assumed exams still existed. But how did the portfolio get in there? Who thought "what our system needs is some extra corruption and subjectivity"?
the point is, there is no backup for 15 days. These guys could be sued for million in US or other country.
Error aka Someone "important" couldn't back up their CV with a valid record.