WebedtecH

I had it.  I know I did.  Now I can’t find it.  My precious little 8 GB thumb drive that I kept personal information, portable applications, and associated “stuff” on has gone on walkabout.  Now, I’m not worried so much about the personal info since everything was encrypted on the drive (everything of importance that is) but just the raw inconvenience of not having it is bugging me.  Luckily a while ago I started backing up the contents of the drive on a regular basis.  I’ll explain how…but you Mac users are on your own since my process only works on a PC.

The solution was simple enough.  I wrote a batch file (oh take me back to the good old days) that would copy anything that had changed on the drive to my hard drive with a single command.  Here’s the contents of the batch file (ironically called flashback.bat):

Since F: is the drive letter my flash drive is always assigned to when I plug it into the computer it’s easy to designate the batch file to copy all the contents of the drive.  The cool parts come from the switches at the end.

These two switches are enough to do a complete automated backup by just running the batch file.  If you want a smarter file add the following one:

This way only those files who have been modified since your last backup will be copied, making it process much faster.

No matter how you do it, get into the habit of backing up your portable drives in case they get lost, stolen, consumed by a canine, etc.  You can never be too careful.

Tags: backup, thumb drive, usb, data, portable

Open Thinking & Digital Pedagogy » Freedom Sticks For The Classroom

Alec has posted an interesting article about his efforts to get around overly restrictive filtering and access controls.  In our back and forth comments a thought occured to me.  What if we were to use USB drives as “keys” to the internet.  Here’s the idea:

1. The teacher is given a USB key that includes a file with an encrypted sequence of characters that acts as their “authorization code”.
2. When they log into the network,  the login script looks for the key file and verifies the authorization code on the USB drive is the same as the one associated with the teacher’s account.
3. If they match, the teacher is granted full access.

What if scenarios:

1. Teacher logs in without the USB key - teacher is given standard network access (student level)
2. Student logs in with teacher’s USB key on student account - no special permissions are granted and a notification is sent to IT
3. One teacher logs in with another teacher’s USB key - only student level access is granted.
4. USB key is lost - the authorization code for that teacher is changed on the server, immediately making the old code invalid

I’m sure there are dozens of other situations we would need to take into account (and that it’s similar to VPN connections but not quite), but I’m curious what the IT people and teachers out there would think of this?

Those being my USB Drive and Instant Messaging.  Pidgin, which is quickly becoming part of my instant messaging mainstay:

Pidgin Portable 2.1.0 has been released. Pidgin Portable (formerly Gaim Portable) is the versatile Pidgin instant messaging client packaged as a portable app, so you can take your IM settings and buddy lists with you. It has all the same great features as Pidgin, including support for AOL, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ and Jabber networks, but there’s nothing to install on the local PC. You can also add portable encryption plugins for secure, encrypted messaging. It’s packaged in PortableApps.com Format so it can easily integrate with the PortableApps.com Suite. And it’s open source and completely free.

Oh happy day!

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