I’m Sorry, Prof—My Hard Drive Crashed

When it comes to getting paper extensions, “My hard drive crashed” is quickly becoming the 21st-century equivalent of “The dog ate my homework.” I’m not sure I’ve gone through a single semester without hearing those words from some worried (or wasted) classmate.

But there is a difference between the new excuse and the old: while teachers could easily dismiss pleas from yesteryear as simple excuses, students’ increasing reliance on computers makes the new claims much harder to dismiss, especially considering that most faculty members have at one point faced the blue screen of death.

Students who ask for extensions based on crashed hard drives put teachers in a hard spot.

From the University’s standpoint, the best solution would be to put the responsibility directly on students—“It’s your hard drive; it’s your responsibility to ensure you have backed up your files”—and indeed, many professors have taken a hard line against this excuse. But this seems like an awfully harsh way to get around the problem.

Enter Acronis.

Acronis Disk Director is software that creates a perfect duplicate of every file on your computer. The program is designed to allow for scheduled updates, and it works in the background while other things are going on, so that after an initial setup process, users never have to worry about their files again. By providing the software to students, Columbia would make it easy for professors to deny any student’s extension request, while washing its hands clean of any guilt associated with doing so. Meanwhile, students would come out ahead, because they would have a relatively foolproof way of making sure that in case of an actual crash, they are protected.

The premise behind this is not new. Columbia already provides some free software to students (does anybody know what a Fugu is?). The majority of these programs, including PC PhoneHome and Symantec AntiVirus, are focused on computer security.

Some may say that Acronis is an overpriced luxury, something that, like school-issued laptops for incoming students or Wi-Fi across campus, has been implemented at other schools but is impracticable here due to the cost. It’s a point worth considering. New copies of the software retail at $40 a pop. Columbia would also have to provide hard drive space for the backed-up files, with duplicates in case one server goes down. Assuming Columbia couldn’t find a bulk purchase discount, and that everybody used the program—an enormous overestimate of the cost—Columbia could provide a reasonable 10 gigabytes of backup for papers, PowerPoints, and essential multimedia components, plus the software, for less than a half million dollars. A more reasonable estimate might be half of that, about $200,000, or twice what the University is spending on a new emergency communications system which would blast messages from the University via various methods to students, administrators, and faculty.

Fortunately, there is a clear source of funding for the project. Sometime in the past year, Columbia University Information Technology removed free student access to Computer Associates’ eTrust PestPatrol software, a program which kept students’ computers free of spyware and other malicious code. If the funds saved from providing this software were applied to a bulk purchase of Acronis, the total cost of the endeavor would cost just a small fraction of CUIT’s $50 million budget and the equivalent of a rounding error in the University’s overall ledgers—all for a project that would save students the enormous stress of a computer crashing during finals and allow professors to enforce deadlines, no matter the sob story. The administration can make a big deal about it on admissions tours, and it’s also a good thing to do. Whether it’s worth the cost is a debate to be had by others, but the benefits of such a system would help everybody involved.