Our network drive that contains the drawings and notes about drawings for the CAD group contains 1.2 million files of which about 10K are useful.  Apparently, the world will come to an end if we don’t save the other ones which are non-human-readable, non-dependent, non-mandated files generated by a module in our software we no longer use.  My boss asked me to oversee the backup as he was on vacation on Friday and ran into trouble doing it the previous few days and I jumped at the opportunity.

All went well with the first 1.1 million of the 1.2 million transferred perfectly using TeraCopy but I kept running into a deluge of transfer errors which caused the program to lockup.  After trying a few things and probably breaking storage best practices in a dozen ways including forcable unlocking every file on drive, checking for faulty sectors, and applying some network juju to find hidden files I checked the free space.  Space available on drive: 120 megs.  Space required for backup: 292 gigs.  I’ve seen 7zip do some impressive shit, but it may have met its match and I was reminded of a rule I learned at RadioShack.  The complexity of the problem is inverse proportional to the complexity of the tools used to find it.