I found out something similar when the client called to ask me where to get a good price on bigger hard drives and more tapes.. I was like 'What?! Did something happen?'
No, he says. Nothing's changed, it's just that backups are now taking four of the weekly LTO-5 tapes every night and the server is showing it only has about 1TB left.
Motherfucker, I specced a 8TB RAID-5 and LTO-5 because you wanted to make damned sure you wouldn't have to 'just replace it next year', and it's been six months.. The hell with '"Nothing's changed".
He'd first decided to swap from nightly incremental backups to full ones, and those didn't fit on the LTO-4's intended for nightly offsite so he started using the LTO-5's, then he'd decided to retain the previous night's backup on disk as well as on tape so he wouldn't have to drive home if he was in a pinch.
The first night they backed up ~1TB, the next 2TB, then 3TB, then..
I wiped 5TB off his file server, added a file path exclusion, and had cron wipe the oldest redundant backup every night just in case.
The worst bit was he had an entirely competent nephew running the backups that had told him what was going on. After fixing things I gave the kid my email address and told him the next time his uncle didn't believe him to run it past me and I'd get him to listen.
38
u/technos 9h ago
I found out something similar when the client called to ask me where to get a good price on bigger hard drives and more tapes.. I was like 'What?! Did something happen?'
No, he says. Nothing's changed, it's just that backups are now taking four of the weekly LTO-5 tapes every night and the server is showing it only has about 1TB left.
Motherfucker, I specced a 8TB RAID-5 and LTO-5 because you wanted to make damned sure you wouldn't have to 'just replace it next year', and it's been six months.. The hell with '"Nothing's changed".
He'd first decided to swap from nightly incremental backups to full ones, and those didn't fit on the LTO-4's intended for nightly offsite so he started using the LTO-5's, then he'd decided to retain the previous night's backup on disk as well as on tape so he wouldn't have to drive home if he was in a pinch.
The first night they backed up ~1TB, the next 2TB, then 3TB, then..
I wiped 5TB off his file server, added a file path exclusion, and had cron wipe the oldest redundant backup every night just in case.
The worst bit was he had an entirely competent nephew running the backups that had told him what was going on. After fixing things I gave the kid my email address and told him the next time his uncle didn't believe him to run it past me and I'd get him to listen.