Can It be a story I was involved in but I didn't do it?
I used to work for a major university as a student systems admin. The only thing that was "student" about it was the pay-- I had a whole lab of Sun and SGI servers/desktops, including an INCREIDBLE 1TB of storage-- we had 7xSun A1000's (an array of arrays) if memory serves.
Our user directories were about 100GB at the time. I had sourced this special tape drive that could do that, but it was fidgety (which is not something you want in a backup drive admittedly). The backups worked, I'd say, 3/4ths of the time. I think the hardware was buggy, but the vendor could never figure it out. Also, before you lecture me, we were very constrained with finances, I couldn't just order something else.
So I graduated, and as such had to find a new admin. We interviewed two people, one was very sharp and wore black jeans and a black shirt-- it was obvious he couldn't afford a suit which would have been the correct thing to wear. The other candidate had suit, and he was punching below his weight. Over my objections, suit guy gets hired.
Friday night, my last day of employment I throw tapes into the machine and start a full L0 backup which would take all weekend to complete.
Monday morning I get a panicked phone calls from my former colleagues. "The new guy deleted the home directories!"
The suit guy literally, had in his first few hours destroyed the entire labs research. All of it. Anyways, I said something to the effect of, "Is the light on the AIT array green or amber?"
"Green."
"You're some lucky sons of bitches. I'll be down in an hour and we'll straighten it out."
As the others have correctly intuited-- its a tape backup system. We couldn't afford a proper tape library with a robot. I can't remember why, but there was a limitation of the software or SunOS that we needed to be able to get an L0 onto one tape. This thing was two Sony AIT tape machines that had a special SCSI board that made them look like one single drive to the host thus doubling the capacity. It was just enough to skate by. I didn't have much faith in differentials and didn't like to let them run more then a few days as well.
I always assumed the fault was in that SCSI board. The hand-off between tape-1 and tape-2 was what usually failed. The problem might occur 24 hours into a backup so it was difficult to get good backups. Also, I was not a full time employee (being a student), so I couldn't babysit this thing 5 days a week like a full time employee. Also, it kind of killed the performance of the system, so I had to do them at odd hours.
I am proud to say I never lost a single bit at that job.
In essence if this backup had failed months of research would have been lost (maybe two to 4 week old backup x 12 researchers).
I used to work for a major university as a student systems admin. The only thing that was "student" about it was the pay-- I had a whole lab of Sun and SGI servers/desktops, including an INCREIDBLE 1TB of storage-- we had 7xSun A1000's (an array of arrays) if memory serves.
Our user directories were about 100GB at the time. I had sourced this special tape drive that could do that, but it was fidgety (which is not something you want in a backup drive admittedly). The backups worked, I'd say, 3/4ths of the time. I think the hardware was buggy, but the vendor could never figure it out. Also, before you lecture me, we were very constrained with finances, I couldn't just order something else.
So I graduated, and as such had to find a new admin. We interviewed two people, one was very sharp and wore black jeans and a black shirt-- it was obvious he couldn't afford a suit which would have been the correct thing to wear. The other candidate had suit, and he was punching below his weight. Over my objections, suit guy gets hired.
Friday night, my last day of employment I throw tapes into the machine and start a full L0 backup which would take all weekend to complete.
Monday morning I get a panicked phone calls from my former colleagues. "The new guy deleted the home directories!"
The suit guy literally, had in his first few hours destroyed the entire labs research. All of it. Anyways, I said something to the effect of, "Is the light on the AIT array green or amber?"
"Green."
"You're some lucky sons of bitches. I'll be down in an hour and we'll straighten it out."