WRSG off air, but we're coming back!

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Greg Goodfellow
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Location: Friendly, West Virginia...I kid you not

WRSG off air, but we're coming back!

Post by Greg Goodfellow »

Thanks to Scott Northcraft, Operations Manager of Seven Ranges Radio, we are slowly but surely recovering from a hard-drive failure suffered Wednesday night. To get us up and running in some fashion, Scott bought a new hard drive (of course, he will be reimbursed) while the other one is in transit to a recovery center via overnight delivery (we should know the fate of the hard drive Friday). In the new drive, he has copied files from WVVV-FM, which will give us an AC sound, rather than the variety presentation we're known for. However, this should get us on the air sometime this weekend. As I type this, I'm at the school, as Scott is making his way to WRSG. If you have ever read our station's FB page, "Knights Radio WRSG 91.5 FM," you'll know he put on hundreds of miles just today for us, while taking college classes AND running 3 radio stations.

In case we've experienced radio Armageddon with the old drive, this will buy us around six weeks, while we frantically feed the beasts all my CDs, utilizing my four radio classes. We WILL be back as normal eventually. GOD BLESS SCOTT NORTHCRAFT and "Seven Ranges Radio." Without them, we're nothing. Partnerships like the one I enjoy on a daily basis should be experienced by every high-school station still out there. I could say MUCH more, but you get the idea. BTW, we will investigate how we can put our files on (in) the 'cloud' so this will NEVER happen again. Not surprisingly, Scott has ideas for this as well.
"Television is a medium because anything well done is rare."
~ Fred Allen ~

“Radio is the theater of the mind; television is the theater of the mindless”-Steve Allen
sportsvoice
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Re: WRSG off air, but we're coming back!

Post by sportsvoice »

One thing you might try (and you won't need the cloud for this) would just be to buy a NAS device (Network Attached Storage) and then use a scheduled task to periodically back up the automation drive to it.

I have something similar set up at the LPFM I take care of. There are two automation computers with StationPlaylist installed, and a third computer with Linux that acts as a file server/gateway to the isolated LAN that the automation systems sit on. Every night at 1:00 AM the main automation computer syncs the audio and playlist folders to the file server, then at 2:00 AM the spare syncs its directories to match whatever is on the server so it gets any changes . That means there's a hot spare computer ready to go on air, with the same exact logs that were running on the main.

The sync operations are nothing fancy, it's just a Windows scheduled task using the robocopy command which only copies over new or changed files.
Greg Goodfellow
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Posts: 574
Joined: Wed Mar 24, 2004 3:16 pm
Location: Friendly, West Virginia...I kid you not

Re: WRSG off air, but we're coming back!

Post by Greg Goodfellow »

Thanks, Sportsvoice! Scott and I were discussing this today as we were loading bluegrass tunes, as my house would be surrounded by folks with torches if bluegrass was not available...yep, the scene from "Frankenstein" works. BTW, thanks to Scott, we were down just 25 hours! The company that got our hard drive said it would cost around $2,500 to extract the data. It was not worth it. We'll get it back and see if we can find some place cheaper.
"Television is a medium because anything well done is rare."
~ Fred Allen ~

“Radio is the theater of the mind; television is the theater of the mindless”-Steve Allen
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