Vocal Voices

When you are ready to start building something new. You've spend the last month and a large sum of money rescuing your data and you want to find that DVD image to build the new server.

So you go and look for your downloads directory. 10 years worth of collecting hoarding, tools which are no longer available, etc....

So I go to where it should be.

Nada.

So I then go through the card deck of hard drives I have been using to play origami with my data. Only to find that it's simply not there. Depression sets in. After all this work and money did I really delete the data I was so frantic to save?

My memory twinges. Didn't I compress the whole folder to a single file because I ran out of space.

Round the houses again. No compressed downloads file.

Depression settles again.

Until, memory asserts itself again. I have a 500gb hard drive in my netbook of which I'm only using 100gb. Didn't I copy the file there??? Rush to get netbook, power it on, Windows10 launches install without asking.... Grrrrrr. Killed that. Look in d:\downloads and find downloads.7z, 230gb compressed.

Depression lifted. All I need to do now is get the data out of It again....... I really should keep a list of what I have done with all this stuff. A crazy golf course has less twists and turns than I've had to do to keep all my data....

Just thought I'd share that little senior moment with you....

And you prolly think you're unique.

I have a T shirt, and a few HDs, you can buy.

Nah, I'm nowhere near unique in that. We all do it.

I just thought people would like to hear that we're all human and we all make mistakes, no matter how much we know about computers. The world was getting pretty dark there for a while....

I don't think I need any more disks. I now have 46tb in the apartment.... Part of my manic desire to keep two copies of the data and the ability to build a new server and create a third copy before cleaning everything out and moving back to one copy and one backup.

Nothing like herding the horse back into the stall and creating a huge barricade....

The funny thing about all this is that when we designed the email system for Philips world wide back in 98, we specced 30tb of disk space for it. The cost on the technology of that time (9.6gb SSA disks), was astronomical. I think in the tens of millions. I know that my design changes for the controllers on the servers and the restructuring of the disks cost $3m extra.

Here I am, at home, with more storage than we defined for corporate email for 110,000 users and they had 3 mailboxes each... I should have taken a photo of the storage servers in Eindhoven. That was 25tb and it was 30' of width of cabinets 5 feet high and 5 ranks deep.

Times change but we still lose data...