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On Thursday, Jan 11, North Sanpete School District’s PowerSchool server was wiped, losing grade data for all schools across the data.
The most recent backup that they were immediately able to recover was from Dec 24.
This worked out fairly well for the high school, as the term had ended before Christmas break and most teachers had grades finalized. The middle school was not as fortunate, with their quarter ending the exact same day that PowerSchool failed.
The district is currently in the process of transferring data from individual servers to a server farm. Instead of having a server dedicated to each of the programs, they’re putting all of them onto three shared servers. Meaning that if one of them fails, the others will be able to back it up.
“We were working on the process of putting our last piece of the backup puzzle in place,” said district IT [person] Sean Rawlinson. “While it was being worked on, it froze.”
Pop-up prompts showed up, and as one of the IT workers tried to quickly click through these prompts. As this was happening, the server unfroze, and a prompt asking about the network storage unit appeared in front. Without realizing, the wrong option was clicked, wiping the data for the unit.
“It could have happened to anybody,” Rawlinson said.
They had already partially implemented the backup server plan. The backup server located in Richfield had gone down on Dec 24, hence that being the last date they were immediately able to recover. This was due to a power outage that occurred that day in Richfield.
Because this happened over the break, no one was there to make sure that the backups were successful.
The high school took a calm, patient approach to fixing the issue.
“We came back and regrouped, [coming up with] a game plan,” said NS principal Nan Ault.
The first thing that NS did was figure out which teachers had put in more grading information over the break.
Even though the term ended on Dec 22, teachers still have until Jan 8 to post final grades. When grades are posted, they’re sent off to the state.
“We talked, and we felt like we could retrieve [the date from the state], and convert it back to the historical grades we had posted,” Ault said. “So I got all the teachers together, and told them ‘don’t do anything, just leave it.’”
Within three days, NS PowerSchool consultant Richard James was able to make the conversions, restoring the grades.
“We could have started the restoring process,” Ault said, “but based upon the fact that we had all the historical grades there, I thought it was worth the wait. So we waited.”
Along with PowerSchool, the district’s financial system TES was part of the server that was wiped. Thanks to a fortunate coincidence, the high school was able to avert that crisis.
“Luckily, [NS fee person] Brenda had been working on a card swipe issue,” Ault said, “and TES had advised her to make a backup on the eighth [of January].”
