Who do the IT guys come to when trouble strikes?

[Judland]

... The resident Linux fanatic, apparently.

One of our office IT / Microsoft fan-boys shows up at my cubicle this morning.

"My father-in-law's XP machine will not boot up this hard drive of his," he says as he shows me the defunct hard drive in his hands. "I've tried everything that I could, but I can't gain access to it. My father-in-law is pretty upset as this thing has over three gigs of family photos."

"Tsk, tsk," I utter, shaking my head. "That's terrible."

"Do you think you could do something to rescue the data?"

"Sure," I say. "I'd be glad to help."

I shut down the clunker of a PC that was deemed un-useful by our IT dept. (running Linux and the eGroupware software I've been testing out for the past month) I have at my desk, unplugged the hard drive and plugged in his father-in-law's. Then, I got out my Knoppix CD and booted the system up.

Two minutes later, there we have it.... KDE and an icon to the attached drive. Double click and we're in.

"I don't have a CD burner on this box," I say, "but if you have a USB thumb drive, or something, we can use that."

"I'll be right back," the happier looking IT guy shouts as he runs back to his desk.

I'm now copying over the treasured pictures and files.

Linux to the rescue, once again. When will these guys see the light?

[Linc]

... The resident Linux fanatic, apparently.

One of our office IT / Microsoft fan-boys shows up at my cubicle this morning.

"My father-in-law's XP machine will not boot up this hard drive of his," he says as he shows me the defunct hard drive in his hands. "I've tried everything that I could, but I can't gain access to it. My father-in-law is pretty upset as this thing has over three gigs of family photos."

"Tsk, tsk," I utter, shaking my head. "That's terrible."

"Do you think you could do something to rescue the data?"

"Sure," I say. "I'd be glad to help."

I shut down the clunker of a PC that was deemed un-useful by our IT dept. (running Linux and the eGroupware software I've been testing out for the past month) I have at my desk, unplugged the hard drive and plugged in his father-in-law's. Then, I got out my Knoppix CD and booted the system up.

Two minutes later, there we have it.... KDE and an icon to the attached drive. Double click and we're in.

"I don't have a CD burner on this box," I say, "but if you have a USB thumb drive, or something, we can use that."

"I'll be right back," the happier looking IT guy shouts as he runs back to his desk.

I'm now copying over the treasured pictures and files.

Linux to the rescue, once again. When will these guys see the light?

And people always ask me why I am paranoid about backups.

[snarkout]

Backups are getting harder and harder to do - HTF do you backup half a terrabyte? GF-F-S, sure, so start with 150 dvds, and then do incrementals, but we all know dvds die, so how often do you reburn those 150 dvds? Or do you all have tape units?

[CptnObvious999]

Backups are getting harder and harder to do - HTF do you backup half a terrabyte? GF-F-S, sure, so start with 150 dvds, and then do incrementals, but we all know dvds die, so how often do you reburn those 150 dvds? Or do you all have tape units?

What I do is I just backup my personal files movies, music, documents, etc onto DVDRWs and I don't backup the rest, most of the time I can recover if something goes wrong and I haven't had much luck getting a complete system backup restored. I suppose the easiest option would be to go with a RAID solution since harddrives are pretty cheap.

[chuck]

Backups are getting harder and harder to do - HTF do you backup half a terrabyte? GF-F-S, sure, so start with 150 dvds, and then do incrementals, but we all know dvds die, so how often do you reburn those 150 dvds? Or do you all have tape units?

External hard drives are cheap. Buy some of those 250G or better hard drives that are on sale each week for like $70 somewhere. And enclosures run ~$25 each.

Store the backups off site somewhere and do your incrementals. Redo the entire thing every so often.

[Linc]

Backups are getting harder and harder to do - HTF do you backup half a terrabyte? GF-F-S, sure, so start with 150 dvds, and then do incrementals, but we all know dvds die, so how often do you reburn those 150 dvds? Or do you all have tape units?

Well, what I do is first decide very carefully what i can and cannot live without and/or recreate within a reasonable time. Mostly this means I backup data files and config files and code only, and most of that is highly compressable.
Now keeping that in mind, I have a lot of stuff at home and the full backup of everything I have minus my multimedia files takes up much less than a dvd. My media files are another matter entirely and what I do with those is either maintain 2 up to date copies on different hard drives, or 1 on a hard drive and 1 on dvd.

At work it's much the same. we generate a *lot* of data there and I do weekly full backups and daily incremental backups. The full backups even with all the data we collect are only a few gigs compressed and the incremental, only a few hundred megs. These are automatically turned around every 15 days so I always have on hand at least 2 full weekly backups and 2 weeks of incremental ones. Granted, again, we don't do multimedia files at work (not that *I* have to back up anyway) and any normal data other than that compresses a lot.

Now to answer your question about backing up half a terrabyte, I would simply purchase enough hard disk space to do it. These days you can get a terrabyte of drive storage for well under $1000 and if you company is generating that much data, it should be making enough money on it to spend $800 or so to keep it. Now there are a lot of people who will correctly tell you that tape storage is a great way to handle this, after doing this sort of thing a few times I can tell you tapes are impractical with todays turnaround times. I cannot even imagine trying to restore 500 megs of data off of a tape on a deadline. Hard drives are cheap, quick and easy to get your time sensitive data off of quickly.

[KaosX]

Im in the middle of implementing a 12 tape backup system at work.

Each tape is 200gb uncompressed and 400gb compressed
kinda expensive but it holds all ouf our SQL db's and source code, because of the nature of our business we do full backups everyday

I think the last time I checked we had about 50 gigs of data that gets backed up daily. and roughly 200 that is GF-F-S which is considered "more expendable"

We've got way too many tapes but id rather have more than not enough or none at all.

[Judland]

Backups are good and should be done... but kind of not the point I was making.

I just wondered how much information and work is lost because these so called "IT professionals" just assume that a faulty MS-Windows hard drive is un-recoverable and, therefore, reformat a hard drive without recovering the important information just because MS-Windows lacks the capability.

[johnnywtllts]

just wondered how much information and work is lost because these so called "IT professionals" just assume that a faulty MS-Windows hard drive is un-recoverable and, therefore, reformat a hard drive without recovering the important information just because MS-Windows lacks the capability.

You can add one here Judland. I won't make that mistake again. A few months ago my Dell laptop wouldn't boot. I stuck in an Ubuntu disk and mounted the Windows partition in a matter of seconds. Didn't really care that much about the data on it (usually do everything in Network folders) but saw the data there.

Gave the laptop to IT, after about 8 hours of them trying to image the drive - they informed me they couldn't save any of the data.

But that was kind of the point I made in a post last week. A person like ourselves can actually do our job "inspite" of the IT dept at times. I don't blame them necessarily - they just do everything by Windows rote, and if it doesn't work it can't be done.

I can have a kick-ass equivalent FLOSS app loaded and running in minutes with Admin. privledges, or I can wait for 3 weeks while they spend hundreds of dollars on the proprietary version. But hey, I kinda figure it's their gig.

So I would say the answer to your question is a lot.

[Judland]

I can have a kick-ass equivalent FLOSS app loaded and running in minutes with Admin. privledges, or I can wait for 3 weeks while they spend hundreds of dollars on the proprietary version. But hey, I kinda figure it's their gig.

So I would say the answer to your question is a lot.

Yup, I agree. I also don't rely on our office' IT department much. As you've observed, every request I make is not carried out as they think it will take too much work or money to accomplish. So, I do most of my own IT stuff.

I had a discussion with our office manager about a better way of exchanging information between our engineers and the projects they work on.

Of course, even our office manager was told by corporate IT that there wasn't anything in the budget that would allow for such a system. So, I came up with my own solution. I'm now in the process of doing a test case with eGroupware. It's working out quite well and should fit our needs perfectly.

Thankfully the office manager at our location is someone who isn't afraid of cutting through corporate red tape here and there if it means a better company in the long run.

I do think I started to open the eyes of at least one corporate IT guy today. He commented a few times to me throughout the day at how impressed he was with how easily I recovered his data for him. He's a younger guy, too... so I have hope for him.

I also think I made some progress with the demonstration of Mandriva 2007 and AIGLX/XGL at our last office LUG meeting. Three people this week (who showed no interest in Linux before) stopped by my cubicle to tell me that they looked up more information about Linux on the Net.

I'm really starting to think that fitting the word Linux into every second sentence I say at the office is starting to pay off.