“No, your episodes of ‘Prison Break’ can not be stored on the file server.”

This has been a long few days. First, I had the folks who were getting all miffed at me because I couldn’t help them with their web-based application, and now things have gotten more annoying.

I had a co-worker complain that the tape-backup drive in our small file server upstairs wasn’t actually backing anything up. After tweaking the tape settings, the job setting and finally watching through the logs as the thing ran, I come to find out that the DDS-3 tapes were full and that’s why the backup wasn’t finiishing completely — there was too much data on the server and not enough tape. I thought to myself “How could that be? This server is barely used and the 18GB SCSI drives have never been more than half full.” Open up “My Computer”, sure enough, the C:\ drive only has about 300 megs free. So something on the server was taking up a ton of space. Time to find out what it was.

I downloaded and installed a copy of WinDirStat which gives you a pretty graphical representation of the files on your machine. After I let it scan all the files, I noticed a crapload of *.m4v files, which are MPEG4 video files. After opening up the folder containing the files, and plugging the names into Google (as I couldn’t play them on the file server as it obviously doesn’t have a media player), I come to realize that the files are the first 16 episodes of season two of Prison Break. At about 600 megs a piece, it was taken up 9GB of space on the server. I deleted them, and, magically, the back up was able to run just fine. While there is hardware compression that will theoretically compress the tape’s data so it can fit 24GB of data, m4v files are already compressed, so there was no way it would all fit in the tape’s native 12GB capacity.

The staff has gotten a stern warning about this from the boss, so hopefully it shall not happen again.