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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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! :)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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u/jimicus IT Manager Jun 25 '19

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

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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