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Avoid Running PLATO Pathways Utilities Routinely As you may know, several utilities are installed with your PLATO® Pathways system. The most commonly used utilities include the following:
According to Jim Justin, PLATO Learning's veteran, battle-savvy Technical Support Engineer, running PLATO Pathways utilities routinely is not a best practice. PLATO Pathways utilities were not designed to be run routinely, but were designed to treat specific symptoms of problems when those problems occur. For instance, teachers or students may encounter error messages that indicate a file or table is out of date or corrupt. Searching the knowledge base on key words in the error message leads you to appropriate instructions in the knowledge base that tell you to run one or more utilities. Jim's recommendation is "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Generally, running utilities routinely when there are no problems can be a "snipe hunt" or waste of time. Even worse, running a utility when you don't really need to incurs more risk than if you hadn't run it at all. The risk is small, but increases exponentially if you don't have a recent backup of your system. For example, if you run the Database Repair Utility when you don't really need to and the power fails while it is running, your files and tables will likely be damaged — and though rare, that damage can be beyond repair. Normally, you do not need to run utilities for routine maintenance purposes. If you find that you are needing to do so, especially on a daily basis, users may not be logging out of PLATO Pathways properly. Instruct all users to log out properly and remind them periodically to do so. If you want to continue running utilities on a routine basis, you can choose to do so. But we strongly recommend backing up your PLATO Pathways system prior to running the utilities. |