Google Drive And Windows - Internet goes down?!

[rocknrollstar]

Hi,

We are a large primary school (630 staff, 120 staff). We have windows network (server 2016). Also use Google Workspace, especially Drive. We've moved to solely using Google Drive for all of our SLT, teacher and office team files, and removed windows mapped drives which was used previously. As things stand, these files are all on Google shared drives. We have retained some windows mapped drives but for less important stuff.Question is ... what do you do if the Internet goes down? Was thinking of having a separate machine to have a offline download of the shared drives, and having a ready to go mapped drive that we can deploy through gpo to give access? Ie windows mapped drive of that Google drive?

Thanks for your suggestions.

Edited February 12, 2023 by rocknrollstar

[elsiegee40]

First you do a risk assessment on the impact of losing the connection, the length of time it’s out for and how likely this is to happen.

 

You take into account what staff can do to make sure things can operate without the internet at zero notice.

 

In many ways it’s no different to the assessments you should already have for loss of electricity (do you have a backup generator?), gas or water.

 

To reduce/remove the risk you need a backup internet connection that you can switch to. If you are wholly dependent on the internet then you have to accept that paying for a second physical connection with a different provider as a failsafe is the only option.

 

In my 10 years at my last school, it happened once for 24 hours after the water board stuck a road drill through a cable virtually outside the school. Unless we had had a second line run in from a completely different direction onto the school grounds, I am not sure having a backup would have helped. Fortunately for us, It proved not to be the end of the world.

Edited February 12, 2023 by elsiegee40

[TwistedHelixis]

This is the path my primary schools went down about 5 years ago, so yes sounds like the right track to me.

 

As for the internet issues, we have a few school mobile phones that in an emergency can be used to teather the teachers laptop so they can quickly download the work they might need. You could also look at getting a backup internet line installed, so you can switch to that if needed

[rocknrollstar]

Thanks elsiegee40, that makes complete sense. And agree - it would typically only be minimal time that the internet access goes down. Not really worth a seperate dedicated line.

[rocknrollstar]

Good idea around backup internet phones. We have a few mobile dongles that we'll keep on standby.

[Wave9_Lee]

To help minimise cost, you could combine a voip and internet service across two broadband connections and have failover for both either way.

[ThatBoringBloke]

What would you do if a local server which hosted local shared drives went down?

[Sonic007]

4G Backup router.