Digital Data Back-up

Conversations with Bill Briseno
Nimitz High School Campus Technician

Irving ISD is certainly an exceptional district when it comes to backing up data. Ours is the only public school district in the state that affords laptops for the students as well as the teachers. In addition, students and teachers are allotted “H Drives,” which are drives accessible only through the IISD Intranet, holding one gigabyte of free space. H Drives are especially useful as they accessible from any school desktop or laptop, so if a student forgets their laptop at home, they can pull up an assignment from the H Drive via a classroom desktop. One can imagine the amount of memory required for the many thousands and students and faculty members across the district.
I spoke with Mr. Briseno, Nimitz’ CT, about the process of backing up so much information. He explained to me that the backing-up of information is even more complex than one might think. The backup is initially done at the each campus every night. He showed me the room where this process occurs. With its wires and drives stacked and interlacing in an expensive maze, the aesthetics reminded me of ENIAC due its sheer size. This room was no bigger than a walk-in closet, and definitely claustrophobia-inducing, After the initial on-campus back-up, the hundreds of terabytes and are then backed-up at an off-site location. Mr. Briseno did not take me there, and I don’t think he would have had I asked. Obviously, security is of paramount importance. Two years ago, Irving ISD was the subject of a major identity theft scandal. Hundreds of employees’ Social Security numbers, addresses, and the like were stolen from dumpsters behind the administration building. Campus technicians like Briseno make sure no digital-equivalent to that crime ever occurs.
Briseno was happy to elaborate on the specifics of the process. He told me, “All data is stored on Dell servers both onsite and offsite. As data is collected, [the software] automatically updates the hard drives on the server. A job is run late into the night that will backup the onsite server to the offsite server.” And it is not just H Drives stored on the servers. “Besides storing data bases and production files,” he continued, “payroll, email, inventory and personnel information is backed up.” You can see why he did not volunteer the location of the off-site server. Memory storage will be a major issue in the digital age of education we currently enjoy, and thanks to campus technicians we can have a good level faith that the faculty and students’ info is backed-up, safe and secure.