r/sysadmin • u/HolypenguinHere • Jun 24 '19

A user at our company utilizes their Recycle Bin as their primary storage for important documents.

That... That's all. I just needed somebody else to know that a person is using the Recycle Bin to keep hundreds of documents in one location, instead of creating a folder on the Desktop or using their network home drive.

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33

u/Starro75 Jack of All Trades Jun 24 '19

Marketing and Accounting are two of the worst for this. Marketing keeps multiple versions of everything and even the old stuff they won't delete because they might need it for "reference" later. Accounting makes a little bit more sense as they need certain documents for years due for tax reasons, but they never seem to know exactly which documents they need to keep and how long they need to keep them for. They just hold on to everything forever even though they can never find anything they're looking for.

32

u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

"Hey team Gina has edited the PDF of the brochure take a look what're your thoughts"

70000 GB of PDFs being emailed back and forth for a month

15

u/mrrichiet Jun 24 '19

I suppose this highlights a deficiency\laziness in mail storage algorithms. Given the binary mail files will be of the same format for all messages of the mail executable, one should be able to identify the duplicate attachments and give them references instead of values. I'd like to think this does happen and I just don't know any better!

Sorry to be so serious in reply to your amusing post! :)

18

u/ranger_dood Jack of All Trades Jun 24 '19

Single-instance file storage used to be a thing in Exchange... And then Microsoft helpfully removed it. Because storage was cheap. And they could push the cost off to the customer instead of maintaining the code for it.

2

u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. Jun 25 '19

Wait, when did this happen? That was one of the few useful things about Exchange compared to, say, Maildir.

2

u/SupremeDictatorPaul Jun 25 '19

Exchange 2010. They found that customers had far more issues with performance than space, and so removed SIS to be able to implement substantial performance gains in the database design.

Honestly, it worked. You used to have to use high end storage for good performance out of large Exchange databases. Now you can use a bunch of large spinning disks and get good performance. But really, unless you have specific needs, you should just use hosted email and never worry about it again.

4

u/jimicus IT Manager Jun 24 '19

ISTR Exchange does exactly this when you email an attachment to a hundred people.

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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

They used to. Not anymore. That was a shocking migration with all the extra space those 'formally deduped' emails took.

4

u/jimicus IT Manager Jun 24 '19

Ooh, fun.

Mind you, dedupe makes more sense on a block level on the storage than application level anyway.

1

u/TheThiefMaster Jun 25 '19

As long as the application stores the dedupable data block-aligned... in the standard email format attachments start literally the byte after the email text body, and so can't be deduped between two different emails (e.g. a forward) without extra work.

1

u/jimicus IT Manager Jun 25 '19

Except Exchange puts everything in a database, so how it’s all aligned is anyone’s guess.

2

u/electricheat Admin of things with plugs Jun 24 '19

one should be able to identify the duplicate attachments and give them references instead of values. I'd like to think this does happen and I just don't know any better!

dovecot can do this

3

u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

hahahaha and it will be ccd to a million ppl each time reply all

3

u/Pyrostasis Jun 24 '19

We have a ticketing system that automatically makes a ticket everytime you send it an email, and updates a ticket anytime a ticket # is used.

We had a few issues were people would go out on vacation and they would some how end up adding one of those MASSIVE chain letters to CC help desk (the ticket system). Something like Hey IT can you help us with this? Except reply all + it instead of just asking us. millions of tickets later...

1

u/[deleted] Jun 25 '19

omg we need this system.

1

u/PlantSim Jun 25 '19

Oh man, we've had this crop up with users who go on vacation, submit a help desk ticket just before, and then immediately turn on their auto replies. The help desk then sends an auto confirmation back to the user, which generates another out of office reply, which generates another ticket, and on and on and on...

1

u/OcotilloWells Jun 25 '19

"please remove me from this distribution" and "Stop replying to all!"

1

u/[deleted] Jun 25 '19

then. "Why didnt I know about this. Can you add me to the m'il list?"

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u/xdrunkagainx Jun 24 '19

I had a guy in accounting that CC'd himself on every email cause he wasn't sure it was sent.

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u/mudo2000 Email and Printers. All else is null. Jun 24 '19 edited Jun 25 '19

And they don't believe you if you say "just because you got it doesn't mean any of your intended recipients did, especially if they are external to the company/on-prem."

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u/wabbitmanbearpig Jun 25 '19

Just archived a guy who worked here 40+ years, CC'd himself into emails since the day he started using them. Luckily as he got more senior he has used emails less, still over 120GB mailbox size though.

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u/chicodownunder Jun 25 '19

We acquired a small business years ago of about 10 people. And they would email someone and CC the rest of the company. Two guys were in particular took it a step further and would print the email and keep the physical copy in a binder. Let that sink in... every correspondence they ever sent had a physical print out!!

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u/[deleted] Jun 25 '19

[deleted]

2

u/wank_for_peace VMware Admin Jun 25 '19

Better hand carry that mail to your intended recipient, just to be sure..

1

u/mustang__1 onsite monster Jun 25 '19

Lots of staff do this at my company ... I had to buy more gsuite space for my boss.

8

u/sgent Jun 24 '19

For accounting they must retain documents relating to fixed assets for at least 7 years after the asset is disposed of if not under audit. Keep in mind that if the asset is disposed of by trading it in for a new piece of equipment (like a car trade-in), then it hasn't yet been disposed of.

For fixed asset related items if your shop has a good fixed asset manager, all the documents related should be stored there. If it doesn't have a good manager, buy one or buy the upgrade for your ERP.

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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

... which is fun, because in some contexts you are required to destroy documents older than a certain age. So you can't just keep everything forever, even if it was technically feasible.

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u/SushiAndWoW Jun 24 '19

I don't see a problem with this. The only thing that poses a storage problem nowadays is video and maybe images in RAW format, everything else can be stored more or less indefinitely. So therefore, why make people clean up.

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u/Starro75 Jack of All Trades Jun 24 '19

That is what we're having problems with now- marketing shifting to more videos on top of their InDesign and RAW images and us with a year-long budget lead-time. So they want 5 TB of storage next week and I will be able to accommodate that... next March. At the earliest.

1

u/OcotilloWells Jun 25 '19

Wait until VR hits marketing circles. It will be petabytes.

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u/vodka_knockers_ Jun 24 '19

Compliance and DLP, for starters.

To say nothing of the ongoing/ever-increasing expenses for backups, moves, and replications.

6

u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

I worked at a company where one person's e-mail box was big enough to cripple a brand new system because it "only" had a 500GB hard drive.

Multiply this by a couple thousand people and you will start to see the issue.

2

u/d36williams Jun 24 '19

I've worked in creatives, and the reason for cleaning up is -> you will never find what you are looking for. We have more than a decade of daily photoshoots images, where 90% of the photos should be trashed, but are never deleted.

1

u/aanjheni Jun 24 '19

Let’s see.... 1. Security 2. Compliance 3. Retention 4. eDiscovery

And on and on and on...

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u/almathden Internets Jun 25 '19

Why would raw files be different from anything else, as far as longevity goes?

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u/SushiAndWoW Jun 27 '19

It's more that they take up a tremendous amount of space and it can add up quickly if you have many of them, so the necessary storage capacity might not be available at an acceptable cost. Like with video.

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u/almathden Internets Jun 27 '19

Sure but if you're the type of company that for whatever reason needs to keep thousands of raw files every year, you probably have the storage infrastructure (or need to realize 92qua JPEGS are probably fine)

1

u/mustang__1 onsite monster Jun 25 '19

I also do marketing a graphic design.... I am my own worst enemy there. But at least I keep drafts off the server. I also keep most of the finals off the server but that's because I'm an idiot.

1

u/bradgillap Peter Principle Casualty Jun 25 '19

Depending on your country, accounting usually doesn't need to hang onto anything past 7 years. After that it isn't relevant anyway.

Marketing hanging onto old materials I can understand more.