Backing Up The Hard Drive

Today's weather: High = 17 Low = 11
Cloudy

Having finally learned my lesson from the previous two hard drive crashes and the loss of two former laptops, I went out to Best Buy today and got myself a 500 GB portable hard drive. I'm now in the process of backing up every single file. Eventually I'll be making backups of those backups, I kid you not.

It was actually last week when I realized how much of a teacher's life depends on the computer. I was chatting with my students about marks and trying to calculate their term 1 report card mark. On that particular day my computer wasn't with me. Trying to explain the calculation by hand was really complex for both myself and the students.

So I said, "OK we'll do it this way then. I'll just go home on the motorcycle during lunch, get the computer, and we can discuss the marks then." Problem solved.

Aside from the all-precious marks, the computer is also used for storing lesson plans, resource files, tests, worksheets, electronic books, teaching videos, and a whole host of other resources. In fact, I'm still trying to get the resources back from the first two hard drive crashes and the loss of the computers that happened while teaching in Dalian, Suzhou, and Wuhan. Some of it will never be recovered.

I was using an ad-hoc USB system for storing data files at first, but since gave it up as it wasn't very efficient. The whole exercise of plugging in U-disks, unplugging them, and transfering them was rather frustrating, not to mention there was a risk of getting a virus. So I figure a portable hard drive is well worth the cash and it could very well save my butt in the future if my computer should crash again.

On the subject of backing up hard drives, I have recently downloaded a whole arsenal of math resources from an FTP site that my former school had put online. Combine this with a trip to Wuhan in August to get files from other colleagues, and it's now a major re-organizing task to put the folders in a way that's easy to use.

When a bunch of teaching resources come together from all over the place, it can get rather messy, so the challenge is to sift through it all and streamling the resources into more usable packages.

During teaching practicum, one of the math education leaders went against the crowd with a statement, but she was basically right on the money. She said that the way lesson and unit planning really works is that you start with the resources you have, and base the planning around that. In other words, you gather resources first, and plan the curriculum later. When it comes right down to it, a well-designed multiple choice test, a review package, and a pre-made answer key are far more valuable than a lengthy document about how you're going to teach the material.

And if you want such documents, for example the boss or the inspector wants to see it, you can always download them from an FTP site where somebody else has already produced them.