Grrr...

[jsbowden]

Can I start killing users?

Monday, I replace all the tapes in the library, noting that for some reason, all the blank tapes I put in it last Wednesday filled up before full backups ran Friday night (I was out Thurs. and Fri. of last week, but being a good systems guy, I made sure things would continue while I was gone). Two days later? All my tapes are full again. So I start looking around, and what's this? Someone has taken the NetApp from 45% full to 80% full. It seems that one of our engineers decided to automate backing up the output of his MatLab runs. All 400GB of them, all reproducible, every night. Despite the fact that they don't change, but hey, NetBackup doesn't know this, it just sees a brand new 400GB .bkp file every night. Of course, all this data is raw numbers. It's ASCII. This...person...is dumping 400GB of unchanging ASCII into an MS backup file every day. Uncompressed. Filling up my file servers and fucking up my backups in the process.

I swear, I'm going to start throwing people off the fucking balcony. Their brains won't noticeably work any less after the 10 story drop.

Comments

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

What do you mean, "start"?

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

As in, begin...

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

One client has one guy who just *will not stop* including his music collection in the backups. As in, we tell him to stop that, remove it, and six weeks later the backups are 20GB bigger again because he *needs* all his crappy "I don't know how to play my instruments and that makes it awesome" mallpunk rolled out to tape.

It doesn't actually cause any problems, because a 90GB backup versus a 70GB backup doesn't make a difference on a 160/320 tape. But it's annoying.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

I'm still on a DLT8000 for backups currently. My Veritas sales rep doesn't appear to know how to sell me a license for my new library and tape drive. So 400GB is 5 tapes assuming perfect 2:1 hardware compression. The reality is that this file is killing 7 tapes a night because, hey, it changed and therefore must be backed up as an incremental! The data were generated over a year ago. I understand wanting it archived, and that's cool and all, but that was NOT the way to do it.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

That's the point where you make a quick business case: The cost of the extra tapes and your time and all the other hassles, as well as the potential for this to cause problems with the REAL backups in case of emergency (large), versus the cost of a 500GB external HDD for this specific guy (~$100).

This is a no-brainer kind of problem. Which is naturally why it's being caused by a user, and why my solution will not be adopted.

[annewashere.livejournal.com]

DLT8000? BLERGH

[carpone.livejournal.com]

In the future you go back in time to write the BOFH series. Fo realz.