Kudos for choosing the extended cuts, I guess

Posted by ScrumTool@reddit | talesfromtechsupport | View on Reddit | 52 comments

I've told this story a few times but never wrote it down anywhere.

Was working on the helpdesk for a company that had a lot of different divisions that all reported to the same corporate. One day I get a call from one of the corporate $users stating his laptop appears to be out of storage. I'd been working on my own flash drive full of useful IT tools and remembered WinDirStat, a data-visualization tool for your hard drive. I'm thinking "OK, lets fire up this tool and see what's up."

Immediately I see 3 GIANT blocks, each one a single file. I check the top of the app and see they are all in a single folder. Head down and click on one of them to get the file name and...well, that would explain it.

"Sir, do you still need the Lord of the Rings Extended Cut blu-ray trilogy on here? We can delete that and make some room." For reference, the trilogy is somewhere north of 100gb for 3 video files. I got a real quiet "...nope..." out of him, deleted the files, and he was on his way.

Turns out he does a lot of traveling. No idea why he loaded these onto his work laptop and not his own device, but I'd probably want some entertainment too.

[-]

Strazdas1@reddit

Hey those 3 movies are close to 12 hours combined. Good quality (think blu-ray) 12 hours video will have you at 120GB+.

The real horror of this story here is that your work computer shits itself if theres more than 120 GB of files on it. How bad is your storrage situation?

[-]

NightGod@reddit

250GB is standard size at the corp I work for. All of your data should be stored on the network, so the only thing the drives really need space for is software and your Outlook .pst

[-]

Strazdas1@reddit

Our outloo .psts are on the network, but our working files are local because network has too high latency.

[-]

NightGod@reddit

If your .psts are on the network, how do you work offline?

[-]

Strazdas1@reddit

Without email. But really we dont. We expect to be always online when we work.

[-]

LanMarkx@reddit

The last few places I've been at keep drives low size for secutiry and backup reasons.

Use the network share. All a large drive does is allow for more data to be lost when a computer is lost/stolen/destroyed/damaged/replaced.

[-]

MattAdmin444@reddit

While I haven't explicitly looked at laptops recently a year or two ago 256 GB drives were still extremely common especially in "thin and light" style laptops.

[-]

Rathmun@reddit

The extended editions on Blu-Ray released in September 2010, so that puts an earliest-possible date on this story. At that time it wouldn't surprise me at all if a work laptop that was only expected to do spreadsheets had merely 250 GB of drive space. If so, those three movies were taking up more than half the drive by themselves. Another 50 or so for the typical bloated OS installation, and you're down to 70GB for whatever the machine is supposed to be for.

Also, the story doesn't say it shit itself, just that it appeared to be out of storage. Which is easily believable.

Ill_Cheetah_1991@reddit

I used that once in a school

The PE department complained that they had run out of their allocated storage space

They could not understand why - they hardly used the computer

at all

ever

Ran WinDirStat and noticed that there were quite a lot of files that wer e quite big - in several different places

turned ou tto be a full set of a series of 20 1 hour Zumba videos that "someone" had downloaded to their shared folder

Then - to be sur e they could all find them

they copied all 20 1 hour videos to everyone's individual folder

and everyone then copied them into another folder "for safety"

Yup - that would fill the disk up

It took a while to explain to the Head of departments that one copy of each video would be enough and I had backups of everything

and that maybe - just maybe - she should check the copyright and otehr such regulations and laws about using them

especially in a school????

all users can be "difficult"

teachers are "special" users

PE teachers are REALLY "special"

xRockTripodx@reddit

Oh, man. I'm the IT director for a small school district. I am stunned beyond belief at the lack of even the most basic technical knowledge of some of these staff members.

I had one call me to her room because she couldn't get the computer to turn on. She had bumped the power button on her monitor. Simple, not even an issue, but an insight into their level of understanding.

Huh - low level stuff that

proper IT Techs in big schools have lots of stories!!!!

but yes - knowing which button switches it off is a common lack

and yet they cope at home???

She strikes me as the type to be able to lock herself in her own car, because she forgot how handles work.

RamblingReflections@reddit

I work in a high-school and I swear I could have written this word for word.

Each department attracts, based on my experience of 10 years trapped in this role, a “type” of person/teacher. Manglement: demands a thing, won’t listen to why said thing is bad/impossible/dumb, and makes your life miserable for trying to enforce their own policies Front office staff/HR/admin: Knows nothing, wants to know nothing, makes everything your problem, and wants you to do their job for them Art/manual arts dept: kooky but cool English/Humanities/Social Studies dept: kooky, with 0 tech skills, and often says, “I’m just not a computer person” Maths/Science dept: Your power users who get themselves into trouble thinking they know more than they actually do And PE dept: the former popular kids and jocks/cheerleaders who never progressed beyond playground bullying. Complains regularly that “the interwebs is down” when actually, the firewall is correctly blocking their social medias.

Working in schools is a different ball game. And the staff are totally different to any other set of users I’ve come across, government or private enterprise, in 25 years in IT.

Wells1632@reddit

For some reason when I was in high school, all four history teachers we had (we only had about 500 students) were also football coaches. The quality of education out of the history department left much to be desired, though we did have at least one who tried.

We also had a singular comp sci teacher... whose teaching network still had the default admin passwords assigned to it when I was there.

androshalforc1@reddit

I remember having a science teacher in HS he was also the head coach, if anyone asked him a football related question it derailed the remainder of the class.

Oh, that is exactly what would happen with the history teachers I had as well, except for the one that actually tried.

KelemvorSparkyfox@reddit

Those that can, do.
Those that can't, teach.
Those that can't teach, teach PE.

ShamshielDF@reddit

Those that can, do. Those that can't, teach. Those that can't teach, write technical documentation.

The reasons for this are monetary. If you teach, your income is an order of magnitude bellow that if you do. so those who can do, do. unless you run into one of those fundamentalists who teach out of principle. they are usually best at their subject and worst at human interactions.

I was incredibly fortunate. One of my science teachers held a PhD, and was an amazing teacher. We blew through the curriculum for one module in about half the time, so she started teaching more advanced stuff to fill in the time.*

I heard after moving schools that she eventually left teaching on account of the politics involved :(

*In "Thief of Time", Susan tells her headmistress that she's started her class on algebra.

"You can't teach them that! It's too difficult for them!"

"Well, they haven't noticed yet."

It was kind of like that.

TMQMO@reddit

Those that can, only can because sometime taught them.

oloryn@reddit

The way I always heard it was with the last line:

Those that can't teach, administrate.

Wiregeek@reddit

This is why there's a pair of 4tb external drives in my laptop bag... movies stay on my media, not yours!

battmain@reddit

Surprised you still have USB access, lol. Some of us had to jump through hoops too get things done in an efficient manner with USB drives. ( They are blocked in our org.)

About 99% of users don't need USB storage access in most companies. It takes executive-level approval to get access where I work, and the executives will get asked about it by their leadership if they start approving too often. Basically the only people who can get USB access are people who regularly accept external media (specialized department), lawyers working in court, or techs who need to work on airgapped systems. We have entire departments that just flat-out can't get access for any reason short of law-enforcement involvement.

Just zero need for most people

Here, some justify and get it with expiration dates. Same with external cloud storage. This was after a standard process was created. It is usually the contact developers as they travel with their libraries and/or tools.

I probably wouldn't if my job description didn't specifically include moving data onto and off of systems that are air-gapped.

meitemark@reddit

Your warez servers are airgapped? :)

pockypimp@reddit

Decades ago my manager at the time told me how he got a call from the NOC about some oddly high data usage at one location on a specific computer.

So he goes out and looks at it, it's a computer connected to a CD/DVD duplicator. Someone had spent the weekend downloading World of Warcraft on the crappy connection and burned DVDs of it.

"Test software to check that cpu, gpu and memory all holds up under intense stress."

It was WoW, not Crysis!

SabaraOne@reddit

Wow, raw Blu-Ray rips? I'm surprised someone who knows how to rip a Blu-Ray doesn't know about Handbrake.

RAW rips would have taken over a terabyte. these are just your typical high bitrate ones. Remmeber that this trilogy is nearly 12 hours combined.

Ferro_Giconi@reddit

A raw bluray rip doesn't mean raw uncompressed video data, which would be far more than 1TB.

A raw blu-ray rip is 25-50GB depending on the type of blu-ray. So 100GB for a trilogy is pretty reasonable to assume it is a raw blu-ray rip.

Blue-ray is not raw video. Its a lossy encoded video. No such thing as raw blue ray rip.

A raw blu-ray rip means the raw data from the blu-ray. It does not mean raw uncompressed video.

Come to think of it, it wouldn't be a truly "raw" Blu-Ray rip either, it would certainly have been remuxed into something like mp4 or mkv, not a raw BDMV folder

Drainhart@reddit

Obligatory comment about Wiztree. It is just like Windirstat but insanely fast.

You can get a coffee break out of slow software.

ScrumTool@reddit (OP)

ill check that out, thanks

Limeandrew@reddit

Obligatory licensing comment, Wiztree is only free for personal use, need a license for commercial use. So we stick with WinDirStat. And the newer versions are much faster but nowhere near as fast as Wiztree

dtallee@reddit

WinDirStat only seems faster now because of SSDs - it still works by scanning individual folders, as opposed to WizTree & TreeSize (and Everything search) that read the Windows Master File Table instead.

frymaster@reddit

more recent versions are much faster than they used to be, on my same hardware. It still doesn't use the MFT method though (planned for 2.3 https://github.com/windirstat/windirstat/issues/196#issuecomment-2598319822 )

Huh, TIL. Haven't used it in years, will have to check it out. Cheers!

Note that software that reads MFT can only get file names and size from it. You still need to scan the files for metadata and content searches.

Thanks for this. I’m looking to move away from TreeSize due to how long it takes to search my shared drives. I didn’t actually realise some read the MFT and others didn’t. Good to know while I’m looking into replacement options.

APiousCultist@reddit

There's a fork that uses the same file tree scanning tech as WizTree so in theory that should be as fast.

Zealousideal_Lack936@reddit

I just checked my server and the DVD quality files for all 3 extended cut movies are 26.2 GB.

Nubetastic@reddit

If he did a lot of traveling then he most likely just wanted to travel with one computer.

Kashue@reddit

yea taking multiple computers through security is a pain and are pretty tiring to carry between gates at multiple lay overs.

gadget850@reddit

Right. In 1992, I was an Army commo chief. Our company clerk came back from leave and could not run the company roster, so he grabbed me. When he ran the dBase app, it quickly showed an error creating a temp file. I started poking at it and discovered Team Yankee in a hidden folder so I deleted it. Then I discovered two more copies. When I left, he was about to go yank someone's chain.

gromit1991@reddit

I'm not IT but I am reasonably IT savvy.

Our shared drive was getting full so, I raised a ticket to request an increase. All fine and dandy.

For a short while!

Shared drive filling up quickly again so I searched for large files, duplicates, etc until I came across a folder where a colleague was backing up his personal share to the section's shared drive. Daily!

(Its been >4 years now so terms may not be spot on).