One of our major databases dating back to '97 seems to have “disappeared”.
It was in a different drive, on the server, so non computer savvy people wouldn’t play around with it.
Thing is, it’s for fall events, so we haven’t really looked at it since last fall. So we can’t say for sure when it was gone. So unless someone 'fesses up to deleting it, we can’t be sure when to backup from.
This thing probably had a million records in it. I can’t believe the gall of someone who deleted it. Names, addresses, what events they participated in, companies, etc. etc.
If you know you have it on a backup somewhere, but just don’t know when it disappeared, you can use a trouble shooting technique called “halving.” For example, if you know that it vanished somewhere in the last 12 months, look at the backup for 6 months ago. If the file is on the backup, you know that the date you need is in the 6 months following that date, otherwise it is in the 6 months preceding that date. Either way, you’ve eliminated 50% of your search.
Next, look at the backup in the middle of the selected 6 month period. Now you have narrowed it down to a 3 month period. By eliminating half of the available “suspects” each time, you can pretty quickly zero in on the date of the last good backup.
I’m a Systems Administrator who also has a lot of trouble with people playing around with data. From deleting complicated queries from Access databases, to searching out their boss’s salary and then running around telling people how to do it, to changing or deleting stuff just to see if they can do it thinking that we SysAdmins have magic powers to fix anything, I feel your pain.
Programmers like to call this method the binary search, because it’s about making a lot of two-way (well, three way, but assuming you haven’t just found it) decisions and slicing your potetial solution space in half each time. The binary search is taught in all introductory courses on algorithms and program design.
Not that any of that matters overly much here, just thought you’d like to know that the method is favored when you can assure yourself your data are ordered. And if your backups aren’t in chronological order, well, you’re screwed even worse.
We always just called it “divide and conquer.” In use long before programming and introductory courses on algorithms. Valid for other situations like weights and RF signals through a complex system.
Well thankfully, I do the backups. Not so good though, I have to submit them to another office. So I know I made them in chrono order, I just hope they still have them.
This is the first thing I thought about. We did lose one in February. Not fired, she quite, but she knew just enough about computers to f*** it up good. I haven’t dared mention it yet, though, don’t want to fling poo unless it’s necessary.
[continuing the hijack]
I’ll buy that.
(But if I’d called it that to the guys I was training, it would have been met (by and large) by a big . “Divide and conquer”, they got.)
[/cth]
I second this suggestion. I used to work at a company that stored all its databases on this behemoth DEC server. Whenever any of us got fed up with our job, we used to wistfully talk about wandering over to the DEC with pockets full of magnets and taking a nice long lean against it.
I was going to suggest this as well. Any System Admin who does backups always looks for the quickest way to do restores
I’ve got a restore story. A few years ago I got a restore request from a high level director and what made this request a little unusual is that he wanted a file from that was deleted in 1997… and he didn’t know the file name. :smack: Technically our stored backups didn’t go back that far, but we did have some tapes from that time and seeing as this guy was a big cheese it was decided we (read: I) would take a shot at it.
I spent 3 days setting up our old mothballed tape system, calling in tapes from the offsite storage vault, and restoring tape after tape of old useless data. Finally I admitted defeat and told him I couldn’t find his data. His response?
“Oh no problem. The file I was looking for had only about 17 lines of code in it. I’ll have a student whip up another one for me…”
. “Divide and conquer”, they got.)