Thousands of student files lost in error | Hacker News Reader

Thousands of student files lost in error

taipeitimes.com

34 pointsmomofarm16 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.

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?

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.

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"?

still exists, but it depends on colledge admission board's decision to take what they want (profilo or exam or both)

Exams don’t give the whole picture.

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/coll...

but after looking the brief intro of how us colledge doing recruiting students, I believe my gov (Taiwan) is going to the (almost) same way

the point is, there is no backup for 15 days. These guys could be sued for million in US or other country.

No they couldn't. This goes on all the time, silently, at K-12 schools in the US in poorer areas, nobody cares, nobody does anything. You think Taiwan is any different than us? They're ahead of us, and if they're fucking this up, we're doing it ten-fold.

The irony is, we spend billions on a contract for the government cloud (the one that Trump famously tried to yoink from Microsoft (who won the bid fair and square) and give to his buddies at Amazon), yet we don't mandate education use at as well, only for the military.

> the one that Trump famously tried to yoink from Microsoft (who won the bid fair and square) and give to his buddies at Amazon)

Er, Trump didn't try that, and Trump hates Amazon (or, more specifically, Jeff Bezos), and the executive branch under Trump awarded it to Microsoft, fought against Amazon’s lawsuit, did a reevaluation in order to moot claims in Amazon’s lawsuit and force them back to square one and reaffirmed the award to Microsoft.

well, (at least) he creates jobs.......but I'd rather he pay teacher for higher salary

> You think Taiwan is any different than us? They're ahead of us, and if they're fucking this up, we're doing it ten-fold.

Well, I'm a resident of Taiwan and while I think there are many wonderful things about the country, IT is not one of them and not sure how you came to the conclusion that Taiwan is "ahead of us" (assuming you're American or European).

Everything related to tech here feels like it's from the late 1990s. Web applications here generally have horrible UIs and are buggy, sometimes to the point of being basically unusable.

It's not just the front end either. See: all of the problems caused by a change to the ARC (alien resident certificate) ID numbers.

https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4293836

This change was itself caused by problems created by the existing/old system.

quick explain to non-Taiwan guy: ARC (alien resident certificate) ID numbers is like social IDs(SSN). It (was) a separate system to our local resident one, until then.

Error aka Someone "important" couldn't back up their CV with a valid record.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com