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Feb 6, 2007
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Originally posted by: RightIsWrong
Originally posted by: WarhammerUC
basically Im just another senior systems engineer. The jr guy hasn't been doing his work so i had to pick up his slack. So they assign him BACKUP and POWER.

While replacing ups, he pulls the power to the array. 8 disk fell out of the raid and the array was not visible, storage toasted..

2nd issue was he was assign to build a new backup tape server and an anti-virus server. Both have not been done for over 1 month.

its okay now, i been backing up the server to disk, secretly on usb... so it kinda look like i saved the day but i didn't.. took a while to restore the data and we had to use back fill from our external vendor..

So you backed up a 1.5TB Information Store onto a USB drive without anyone knowing?

The time it would take to copy that much data alone would cause your server to slow enough to be noticed. Not to mention that any company that has a 1.5TB Info Store has got to be big enough to have had disaster recovery plans implemented and would have ensured that they could be utilized by doing routine testing.

I'm gonna have to call shens.

Yeah, honestly. Who backs up 1.5 TB secretly via USB? Assuming a decent speed, you're still looking at over 10 hours, not including the time it would take to swap hard drives (since there's no 1.5 TB hdd on the market). So what in God's name are you talking about?
 
Dec 27, 2001
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Originally posted by: Atomic Playboy
Yeah, honestly. Who backs up 1.5 TB secretly via USB? Assuming a decent speed, you're still looking at over 10 hours, not including the time it would take to swap hard drives (since there's no 1.5 TB hdd on the market). So what in God's name are you talking about?

It was to 37 iPods.
 

aigomorla

CPU, Cases&Cooling Mod PC Gaming Mod Elite Member
Super Moderator
Sep 28, 2005
21,069
3,575
126
Originally posted by: Atomic Playboy


Yeah, honestly. Who backs up 1.5 TB secretly via USB? Assuming a decent speed, you're still looking at over 10 hours, not including the time it would take to swap hard drives (since there's no 1.5 TB hdd on the market). So what in God's name are you talking about?

tape drives.
 

loup garou

Lifer
Feb 17, 2000
35,132
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Originally posted by: aigomorla
Originally posted by: Atomic Playboy


Yeah, honestly. Who backs up 1.5 TB secretly via USB? Assuming a decent speed, you're still looking at over 10 hours, not including the time it would take to swap hard drives (since there's no 1.5 TB hdd on the market). So what in God's name are you talking about?

tape drives.

no
 

dman

Diamond Member
Nov 2, 1999
9,110
0
76
Story sounds fishy, but, perhaps plausible in a horribly run IT shop.
 

aigomorla

CPU, Cases&Cooling Mod PC Gaming Mod Elite Member
Super Moderator
Sep 28, 2005
21,069
3,575
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Originally posted by: loup garou
Originally posted by: aigomorla
Originally posted by: Atomic Playboy


Yeah, honestly. Who backs up 1.5 TB secretly via USB? Assuming a decent speed, you're still looking at over 10 hours, not including the time it would take to swap hard drives (since there's no 1.5 TB hdd on the market). So what in God's name are you talking about?

tape drives.

no

why not?

http://h18006.www1.hp.com/storage/tapestorage/
 

KLin

Lifer
Feb 29, 2000
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Originally posted by: WarhammerUC
someone bumped the disk array, cause 8 disk ! out of 30 to go out of whack... lost 1.5tb data so far... and no backup...

i might not be around tomorrow, im sure they'll just get rid of the group.. :)

Did you ever tell management how much it would cost to recover lost data when something happened?
 

loup garou

Lifer
Feb 17, 2000
35,132
1
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Originally posted by: aigomorla
Originally posted by: loup garou
Originally posted by: aigomorla
Originally posted by: Atomic Playboy


Yeah, honestly. Who backs up 1.5 TB secretly via USB? Assuming a decent speed, you're still looking at over 10 hours, not including the time it would take to swap hard drives (since there's no 1.5 TB hdd on the market). So what in God's name are you talking about?

tape drives.

no

why not?

http://h18006.www1.hp.com/storage/tapestorage/

*sigh*
Originally posted by: WarhammerUC
its okay now, i been backing up the server to disk, secretly on usb... so it kinda look like i saved the day but i didn't.. took a while to restore the data and we had to use back fill from our external vendor..
 

aigomorla

CPU, Cases&Cooling Mod PC Gaming Mod Elite Member
Super Moderator
Sep 28, 2005
21,069
3,575
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Originally posted by: loup garou

*sigh*
[/quote]

nononono... im just saying tape drives dont work?

why?

Maybe i should post this in highly technical? Im just curious to know why they dont work.
 

Kaido

Elite Member & Kitchen Overlord
Feb 14, 2004
51,579
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Originally posted by: XZeroII
Originally posted by: TheEarthWillShake
There's no backup because management felt it cost too much.

Oh, that makes sense. All's forgiven.

I've worked at too many places were this was the case. One of my managers felt that paying for anti-virus software was "wasting money", despite having weekly outbreaks within our network. I loved being a network admin, but I hated having crazy rules like that to work under.
 

Chiropteran

Diamond Member
Nov 14, 2003
9,811
110
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Originally posted by: Atomic Playboy
Yeah, honestly. Who backs up 1.5 TB secretly via USB? Assuming a decent speed, you're still looking at over 10 hours, not including the time it would take to swap hard drives (since there's no 1.5 TB hdd on the market). So what in God's name are you talking about?

hi speed USB is 60MB/sec, which is faster than the sustained transfer rate of many hard drives so it's not like the interface is even going to be a serious bottleneck.

Yes, a full backup might take close to 10 hours even at that speed, but I don't see why that makes his story so unbelievable. You don't typically sit and wait for the backup to finish, you start it at night and check on it in the morning. The only difficult part of it would be splitting the data between two discs, maybe he just did half of it one night and the other half the next.
 

SoulAssassin

Diamond Member
Feb 1, 2001
6,135
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Originally posted by: Chiropteran
Originally posted by: Atomic Playboy
Yeah, honestly. Who backs up 1.5 TB secretly via USB? Assuming a decent speed, you're still looking at over 10 hours, not including the time it would take to swap hard drives (since there's no 1.5 TB hdd on the market). So what in God's name are you talking about?

hi speed USB is 60MB/sec, which is faster than the sustained transfer rate of many hard drives so it's not like the interface is even going to be a serious bottleneck.

Yes, a full backup might take close to 10 hours even at that speed, but I don't see why that makes his story so unbelievable. You don't typically sit and wait for the backup to finish, you start it at night and check on it in the morning. The only difficult part of it would be splitting the data between two discs, maybe he just did half of it one night and the other half the next.

I doubt he has a single 1.5TB information store in Exchange so all of this is a moot point. If this is a single 1.5TB EDB file then it's another reason someone should be fired. So having 3 500GB backups or 5 300GB backups makes it easier to split across disks.
 

RightIsWrong

Diamond Member
Apr 29, 2005
5,649
0
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Originally posted by: Chiropteran
Originally posted by: Atomic Playboy
Yeah, honestly. Who backs up 1.5 TB secretly via USB? Assuming a decent speed, you're still looking at over 10 hours, not including the time it would take to swap hard drives (since there's no 1.5 TB hdd on the market). So what in God's name are you talking about?

hi speed USB is 60MB/sec, which is faster than the sustained transfer rate of many hard drives so it's not like the interface is even going to be a serious bottleneck.

Yes, a full backup might take close to 10 hours even at that speed, but I don't see why that makes his story so unbelievable. You don't typically sit and wait for the backup to finish, you start it at night and check on it in the morning. The only difficult part of it would be splitting the data between two discs, maybe he just did half of it one night and the other half the next.

The transfer rate isn't the issue. I'm sure that if the bosses wouldn't spring for a library or even tape drives (at ~$1k), they sure as shit are springing for the money to get a backup software app with the capability to do the backups without stopping/dismounting the store (~$1k). And I would also bet that they wouldn't pony up for an Exchange agent (another ~$500-1k) so that they are able to restore at a granular level.

Unless the OP wants to give some more details about the setup/config/state of their backup situation, it is most certainly shens that he backed up that much data without it completely bringing the mail store to a crawl.
 

SoulAssassin

Diamond Member
Feb 1, 2001
6,135
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Originally posted by: RightIsWrong
Unless the OP wants to give some more details about the setup/config/state of their backup situation, it is most certainly shens that he backed up that much data without it completely bringing the mail store to a crawl.

NTbackup.exe will grab the Exchange store hot and write it out to disk. Not saying the OP isn't full of shit but it's technically possible and actually very easy to accomplish.
 

mugs

Lifer
Apr 29, 2003
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I'm just wondering why the OP would explicitly say there were no backups, then he comes back and says that he made backups. :confused:
 

manly

Lifer
Jan 25, 2000
13,286
4,061
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Originally posted by: Chiropteran
Originally posted by: Atomic Playboy
Yeah, honestly. Who backs up 1.5 TB secretly via USB? Assuming a decent speed, you're still looking at over 10 hours, not including the time it would take to swap hard drives (since there's no 1.5 TB hdd on the market). So what in God's name are you talking about?

hi speed USB is 60MB/sec, which is faster than the sustained transfer rate of many hard drives so it's not like the interface is even going to be a serious bottleneck.

Yes, a full backup might take close to 10 hours even at that speed, but I don't see why that makes his story so unbelievable. You don't typically sit and wait for the backup to finish, you start it at night and check on it in the morning. The only difficult part of it would be splitting the data between two discs, maybe he just did half of it one night and the other half the next.
No USB2 hard drive can or will ever come close to 60 MB/s sustained transfer rate.

There are certainly 1+TB external hard drives available; obviously they use more than one drive inside the case.
 

Goosemaster

Lifer
Apr 10, 2001
48,775
3
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To those of you calling shens on backing up to USB: Sometimes you have to go behind management's back to protect their asses; to protect your job too.

I've had to secretly backup to USB many times until I raised hell and got a good system running. Sure we are only talking .5-.8TB here, but hell I did it with NTbackup. I never needed it, and getting it off of all of those drives would've been a BITCH and a half, but it was there.

Doing a snapshot of 1.5TB is pretty far out there but still...
 

Goosemaster

Lifer
Apr 10, 2001
48,775
3
81
<--going home after running some backup maintenance + checks

U's gosta trit it lek de pr0d man....like de pr0d
 

ultimatebob

Lifer
Jul 1, 2001
25,134
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Originally posted by: zoiks
We had a dumbass admin who blew away a vm by issuing a 'rm -rf'. We got our data back somehow but the admin was outta there.

I once had a stupid admin blow away 50 DB2 databases filled with data for 5,000 users with an rm -rf command as well. Since he was a new "global resource" brought in to cut labor costs, though, he basically got a two week paid vacation (his server access was revoked, but was still in the office) while I was getting screamed at to clean up the mess he caused and get all of the data restored. Naturally, some of the database restores didn't work right, and I had to fight with data corruption issues for a week until everything was working.

Management's solution to this was to hire a non-technical project manager to improve the backup system. In order words, her job was to annoy me with stupid questions. Needless to say, I left the company a few weeks later.