By KIMBER KAY
Everything came to a crashing halt in the Engineering Department Tuesday night as the Computer Aided Engineering Design and Manufacturing network went down.
CAEDM is the network for the College of Engineering and is the best student system at BYU, second only to the computer science network, said Greg Fastabend, a senior in electronic engineering technology (EET), from Milani, Hawaii.
'This is the worst possible time for the system to go down,' Fastabend said. 'With the end of the semester only days away and final projects looming ahead, engineering students are in a bind.'
'There goes the semester,' said Kyle Symons, a senior EET student, from Sacramento. Symons said he lost two months worth of work when the system crashed because most of his research was on the Net.
The system failure did not affect all systems, just the I: and G: drives. The I: drive contains engineering students' word processing files and the G: drive holds all e-mail files and Internet bookmarks.
'It shouldn't have happened if the system was configured properly,' said Josh Kapp, a senior EET major from Provo. He said CAEDM should have backed up their files every week, but said he doesn't think it had been done for months.
'We don't know the extent of the data lost,' said Brian McLean, CAEDM systems operator. 'I would like to encourage people to keep multiple copies because no system is fail safe.' He said restoring the 12 gigabytes of lost data will take at least ten hours.
Students disagree about the practicality of saving all files onto disks. Some projects are too big to store on disk or are too impractical because there are several people working on one project, Symons said.
Fastabend said files since Feb. 7 of this year have been lost. McLean said there is no way to tell how much has been lost. He said the system should be up this morning.
Professor Max Raisor of the Mechanical Engineering Department said that he hopes students will be able to finish their projects on time. Raisor extended his deadline for turning in projects by two days. Several of Raisor's students have been concerned about getting their projects done, but he said if they are patient, things will work out.