It doesn’t apply to you?

I’ve been ghosting systems at the schools for the last week and a half (as mentioned previously). As many of you know, when a system is ghosted, everything that was there is gone. The system has a fresh image and anything that the user put on the computer is now a memory (figuratively speaking).

This is a problem for a lot of the teachers/administrative staff at the schools because they really like to save files in their My Documents folder. They do that even though I sent out an email at the beginning of each semester telling them not to because they could lose everything if the hard drive dies. The email also informs them that they can save important files to their user directories, which are on the server, and those files get backed up every night.

Knowing that several people ignore these warnings, I sent out an email about two weeks before the end of school informing them that all computers in my schools would be ghosted and they need to save their important files to their user directory. This email I sent out a week after my manager sent an email out to the entire school system telling them the same thing. Two warnings, two and three weeks before the end of school. Fool proof? Not a chance.

I was at one of my elementary schools this past Thursday and kicked off a ghosting session in the afternoon. The session included about 100 student/teacher PC’s and 10 administrative office PC’s. Friday morning at 5 a.m., I came in and started setting the computers back up on the domain. At about 7:30 a.m., I hear”What did you do to my files!?!?!”. I look and it’s one of the summer school teachers. I tell her that her system was reloaded, just like all the other computers in the school. I then proceeded to ask the stupid question of “Did you not save them to your user drive?”.

Her: What are you talking about?
Me: Your user drive, in My Computer. You got two emails warning you that the systems would be reloaded during the summer so you needed to move your files there.
Her: I didn’t think that applied to my computer since I’m working this summer.

No where in the email did it say that teachers working over the summer wouldn’t have their systems reloaded. I told her that it applied to everyone and apologized for the loss of her files (maybe I should hold a wake?). Thankfully, they weren’t anything too important and she did have the important ones in her user directory.

Always forgive your enemies, but never forget their names -Robert F. Kennedy

11.Jun.05 General

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4 Responses to “It doesn’t apply to you?”

Poe | June 11th, 2005 at 10:41 pm
There’s no way to remove the My Documents folder from the machines? Or at least make it link to their server space?
Bobo | June 11th, 2005 at 11:27 pm
Dude I am in the military and I hear stuff like that from people all the time. Make me want to bang my head in the wall. Until their stupidness goes away and nice JFK quote.
wyckedone | June 11th, 2005 at 11:45 pm
Poe: You can set it so that the My Docs folder is routed to the server. Unfortunately, a lot of unnecessary crap is saved (pics mainly) so server storage space is an issue. That’s why the email goes out to for them to save the important stuff to their user directory/drive.
gb | June 13th, 2005 at 2:48 am
But what could be important to them (IE: Pics of little bobby doing something oh-so-cute) may not qualify as something important to you… If I we’re you I would have specified something like “Back up your grades, your email, and anything relating to your school work to the server. For Bobbie’s pics, I recommend a free email service” Anally retentive, but gets the point across… no?