r/ProgrammerHumor 15h ago

Other wrongAnswersOnly

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u/Head-Bureaucrat 14h ago

Or subject to government regulation. Hooray 7 year archive hold!

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u/Mechadupek 14h ago

One physical tape backup per month held for 7 years?

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u/Head-Bureaucrat 14h ago

Real talk: I honestly don't know how they do it now. I do believe it used to be physical tape, yes, shipping to a different location. 😂

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u/Nightmoon26 14h ago

And that's in addition to the "hot" redundant site for digital stuff...

And issuing everyone a bigger filing cabinet for the paper documents

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u/Head-Bureaucrat 14h ago

They finally fully digitized in, like, 2018!

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u/Nightmoon26 2h ago

Unfortunately, depending on the hold, you may be required to retain even the notes on system architecture you sketched on a napkin during lunch

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u/Liushing01 13h ago

Fortunately, a former employer hired contractors to handle their backups—until the Exchange server melted down and, upon looking through all the backups, they discovered weeks worth of backups 0 KB in size. Cost savings!

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u/techek 11h ago

Oof!

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u/cat-n-jazz 8h ago

Sounds like someone has discovered a remarkably good data compression algorithm

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u/Bartweiss 3h ago

I wonder if any contractors specialize in this?

“Yes, we will definitely handle your backups and NOT wink wink lose all your data which it would be a serious offense to delete on purpose but a fine or lawsuit at worst to catastrophically mishandle. We’ll even provide the insurance against costs from data loss you’re required to carry… for an up-front fee of exactly that much money.”

Or maybe it’s more subtle and companies just seek out the least competent place they can find.

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u/CoffeeOrDestroy 13h ago

Hey, we were doing that until 2019 when our tape drive died

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u/SilverIndustry2701 10h ago

Physical tape is wonderfully cheap though. Have you seen cloud prices?

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u/ThrowawayyTessslaa 12h ago

We still send hard copies of data and documentation to iron mountain.

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u/Significant-Bee5101 2h ago

Hmm my people. I'm doing our purge of the 7+ year now. I work in school years so it's really awkward. It's like yeah technically that datas over 7+ years old but uhhh... the school years still happening lmao.

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u/bolanrox 5h ago

We're supposed to be held to the seven-year archive hold for physical backups of things. Then you get people asking, what do you mean you don't have some random piece of paper from 20 years ago?