An unhappy colleague at work

I think, I made an colleague (somewhat distant colleague) at work very unhappy today, or, to be more precise, to action, which made my colleague unhappy, was already executed a day before.

This particular colleague left my department about 2 years ago and moved to a neighbouring department. However, he continued to use our department host, for storing his Outlook mailbox, which in the meantime grew to about 650Mb. Additionally he was using some disk space under another user name. In total he used about 1.1Gb. No big deal, unless the disk space on that particular disk got tight, which happened to be the case just yesterday.

So, I was hunting for some space, which could be freed and found these 1.1Gb of this particular colleague divided into to user directories. A quick rm -f fixed the tight disk space situation. That was yesterday. Although I did a ls -l I didn’t notice, that the modification date of one of the big files was very current.

Then today I received a phone call from this colleague, that his mailbox, were he kept his important stuff was missing. There it dawned on me and the consequences became very clear. I tried to execute a strategy to recover some date on the reiserfs on this particular partition, which I found on the web, namely this and this, however to no avail.

All things considered we can share the blame for this unlucky situation. Me for not being more thorough to double check, if the disk space was really not required any more and my colleague for not moving his data from a “foreign” host to his direct home environment.

Unfortunately these things happen. This is how a customer might feel, who lost some data using the product, where you yourself did the QA work.

Update: A comment reminds me: what about backups you might ask. Of course am I doing backups, allthough only once a week. In rotation I’m writing to 4 sets of tapes. I’ve two tape devices connected, a Exabyte 85058 and a HP C1537A. So, each tape set consists of a 8mm tape (good for about 8Gb) and a DDS3 tape (approx. 12Gb). Unfortunately sometime at the beginning of this year the 8mm tape couldn’t store all the data intended for this tape (OS and user data). First thing I did therefore was to exclude data from people, which didn’t belong to the department any more. There you have it.

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