Did anyone else have this today when STIMS was having issues? It took and ate all the text from our team’s chairman’s award submission (pictures are still there)… but all the text is gone… The Students only saved it to STIMS assuming it was safe to save it there since they were saving it often.
Sure hope technical staff at FIRST can get it back, or my students are out hours of work and creativity.
This email just went out:
Greetings Teams:
Due to a technical issue with TIMS and STIMS, we are extending FRC award submission deadlines to Friday, 2/17/12 at 12 PM ET for the Website, Chairman’s, Woodie Flowers and Dean’s List Awards.
Please have your team’s designated award submitter(s) login to their account to submit your team’s award(s) by the extended deadline.
We are very sorry for the inconvenience.
Go Teams!
FRC Team Support
Don’t worry, FRC has extended the submission time to tomorrow at 11:00
Darn it… 1 minute too slow
Yeah but they still then have to redo EVERYTHING they typed in… (Their essay was darn close to 10,000 characters and all the other questions answered… that is a lot of work for them to redo as busy as we are tweaking and finishing our build, not to mention as STIMS was the only place they saved it no one remembers exactly how everything was worded so it’s like starting over from scratch.
Assuming they do server backups nightly… I would hope they could recover most of our students essay and questions from tape.
Our team just bit the bullet and re-did the entire thing from scratch… (good job crew)…
Moral of the story, is always keep a local backup!
The advice I try to follow is 3 - 2 - 1. Three or more distinct copies (original and at least two backups), on two different kinds of media (hard disk and flash drive), with one offsite (on a remote networked server or a physical drive kept at a different location).
Emailing the text of an award submission works well to keep it safe from disaster.
Our team has been using Google Docs for rough drafts. This not only saves automatically but gives the entire awards team access to the document at the same time and also at home. We’ve just had to put a very strict “no deleting lines/words/paragraphs without asking first” rule into place. From there we copy/paste into the award submission window.