Corrupt Notebook files

[Rob Jacklin]

Under the heading of "Things I wished I would have known them that I know now:"

I now know that Notebook files are archive files and archive files are really prone to becoming corrupted! The more you transfer them from one place to another, the more likely they are to be corrupted (according Smarttech tech support). So an unsuspecting teacher who is saving all of their hard work on a network drive or a USB drive is actually  increasing their chances of losing their work. The best practice according to tech support is to only have files on the local machine, to ensure "non-corruptibility." 

One of our teachers took her laptop home to create a Notebook file for class (we've already been dealing with user permission issues on files and folders, so she's already feeling a bit burned). After she finished, she saved her files to a local USB drive (a little flash drive) for safe keeping and heads to school. When she goes to open them, only two out of the three open, with the third one throwing the following error: 

So, I call technical support and they shared with me what I now know was available in these forums (http://smartboardrevolution.ning.com/forum/topics/repairing-recover...). They even had me send the file and they tried something to recover the file, but to no success.

I don't remember this being and issue with version 10? Maybe it was and I've always gotten lucky! I really like 11 and the features it offers, but I'm getting a lot of flack from teachers about formatting changes not staying and corrupt files since we've moved to 11. 

Thoughts?

[Rob Jacklin]

Come to find out, the teacher had a very BAD flash drive! The drive eventually corrupted everything on it including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. Thanks to those of you who walked through the process of trying to fix archived files via the link above!

[Obe Hostetter]

Good reminder to have files backed up in more than one place.  Dropbox is one of the most popular.