Problem with USB devices in my work. Help?

[infernox]

Okay lets lay the background info down first,

We are a school with 160 iMacs and 500 Windows 7 PC's

As im working on the school helpdesk we have found that during the year some of the students are having thier entire memory pens corrupted (found out this was the case when using test disk, all the files were random characters and symbols and so were the extensions and file sizes)

I first stumbled on the fact that the students must not be ejecting there memory pens correctly causing them to muddle things up when they pull them out.

I found out that the way macs work they are very unforgiving, apparantly they do random house keeping on the drive occasionaly and if you pull the drive out during this it causes the problem we are having.

As I understand windows does not do this, which is why they are forgiving when you just whip the drive out.

Now you see normally we would just say, well bad luck, buy a new drive and do your work again.

But in this place, some students like to hold there entire years *updated* work on the drive and don't hold it on our servers.

So we are having the problem that they lose their entire years worth of coursework and then thier parents come in rant and raving how are systems arent doing what they should do.

Basically what im trying to say is, is there a way that We could turn off the housekeeping that the macs do on the drive so even afteer we instil that they should eject the drive properly, even if they forget it won't damage the drive and their data?

Sorry for the wall of text but this is becoming an ever more increasing problem that needs to get resolved.

Talking of 20 cases a year.

Thanks.

 

[allosunshine]

I think your best bet would be education in best practices and ways of working instead of trying to mess with the system.
Tell them to make sure they keep up to date copies if their work on the servers as well as the USB sticks and how to eject discs properly. Then the students have no one to blame but themselves.

 

[GeX]

I think your best bet would be education in best practices and ways of working instead of trying to mess with the system.
Tell them to make sure they keep up to date copies if their work on the servers as well as the USB sticks and how to eject discs properly. Then the students have no one to blame but themselves.

A thousand times this.

 

[d_brennen]

They are learning an important life lesson, if it is important to you, back it up

Oh and btw my niece uses DropBox with the school's blessing

 

[edscdk]

I think your best bet would be education in best practices and ways of working instead of trying to mess with the system.
Tell them to make sure they keep up to date copies if their work on the servers as well as the USB sticks and how to eject discs properly. Then the students have no one to blame but themselves.

<not answering the original question but I agree with this...>

educate them that the memory stick is to TRANSPORT data from school to home it is NOT primary storage.... this will also help with the scores of lost memory sticks (and lost work) that never get reported to you...

tweak and mac are things that dont really go together anyway..

 

[Lorddalron]

Again, straying away from your original question, if they loose their memory sticks, will that be your fault too because you haven't backed everybody's work up one by one at the end of each day for them?

Does your infrastructure offer personal storage folders for the students within the schools network? If so, tough titties if there not taking advantage of it and even big hard cheese if they don't back it up at home if they have the facilities.

 

[AbsenceJam]

It's write caching that is the main issue, Windows disables it for (most) USB disks. Would be nice if Apple did too.

You would be able to disable this by mounting/re-mounting these disks with noasync and I am sure this will be achievable automatically with a little testing.