Wait, Backup A Minute…

Some fairly important backups were stuck on a way-too-old server in our server room. The guy in charge is a coworker at some faraway location and is more of a software kind of guy, less the operating system guy, yet I thought he was sort of tech literate.

The operating system on that machine failed and refused all efforts to boot (recovery, rescue, whatever). I was able to recover most of the data, but most of the drives were almost toast.

I got the guy access and told him to urgently get his backups off this machine, as most disks in there are almost done for.

Two months later, I get a phone call.

Me: “So is that server ready to be scrapped?”

Him: “Oh, not yet, the server just needs to hold up until the end of next year, just in case I need those backups, then it can be scrapped. Just wait until then.”

Me: “You do know that you rely on a way-too-old machine with broken hard drives as your backup storage solution running a rescue operating system, right? And that I told you two months ago to urgently get those backups off that server like years before?”

Him: “Getting that much storage somewhere else sounded like a lot of effort, so I just left it like that.”

Me: *Eyes twitching.* “How much data are we even talking about?”

Him: “About one TB.”

I don’t even…

In the end, I just plugged a USB drive into it to transfer the backups into our regular backup system.