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| I hope they don't break this site too. |
We all have our own stories that end with the same refrain. I'll spare you the details, except that after wasting several hours performing thankless committee work (but doing it well, I hasten to add), I'm now repeating said work at a lower level of quality. All thanks to our web development office losing the content I added to several web sites and generally making a hash out of the whole project.
Let's gather together and say with one voice:
Die IT, Die!
I hate it whenever I have to deal with any university office that has a hard time justifying its existence because all they ever seen to do is screw up or say, "no."
ReplyDeleteThe computing services department at the place where I used to teach was like that. Usually their answer was "There's nobody here who can help you," or sending someone who was completely clueless, only to hear them say: "I dunno."
DeleteOf course, this was the place that went from a perfectly operating Unix system to Windoze.... Die, IT, die!
Of course I see the other side of the coin, especially given the proclivity of faculty to call our IT department and scream at them because Blackboard doesn't have some feature they want, or because they opened an attachment, edited it, and now cannot find it again, or because they cannot connect to a server for which they never asked for login credentials, or any number of user errors.
ReplyDeleteI will add that if you rely on ITS or a Web host or any other person or entity, other than yourself, to save a backup copy of your precious Web content, you will lose your content. If it only happened this one time, be thankful and always keep a backup stored in a safe location (not your computer, not your Flash drive, but Google Drive is fine, or just e-mail it to yourself.)
Even outside the real of IT, if documents, content, or other materials are important to you, then keep a copy. Stuff is lost all the time, and not just by IT. Don't allow a single point of failure. Back it up.
Yeah, that part is my fault. I didn't have a backup of the page content and their backup failed. There were other screw-ups that were completely out of my control, which I called them about, again and again and again. All the while, my dean is emailing me with "You told me that you updated that page last week but I don't see it. And this other page is all screwed up. Why did you do that?" As if it's all my fault.
DeleteBut, you're right. Back everything up. I have learned my lesson well. I'll get around to that next week. Probably.
If their backup failed, that's awful. Backing up the entire site is generally a standard part of IT protocol - its part of emergency preparation. Getting them to actually pull a tape (or whatever they store the backups on these days) so you can access the backup is not always easy, but they should have it somewhere.
DeleteIf there's any way to avoid being responsible for the Web site, I suggest avoiding it. It doesn't generally lead to any sort of gratitude for taking on extra work, just complaints if it isn't perfect. But I suppose you know that by now!
Our IT department announced a major upgrade and warned us to back up our files before the upgrade which was to take place on Friday, the 15th of October, this year. So I put the upgrade on my calendar for Friday, and figured I could do the backup on Wednesday. Fortunately, I back up regularly anyway, and do most of my writing at home, so I didn't lose much work. Apparently, they were using one of those new fangled binary calendars.
ReplyDelete