Technically Speaking

Taking a slight cue from a post I read earlier today on TechRepublic, and a brief lull in the craziness that has been flying around the office lately, I thought I would see if I could come up with my own list of resolutions for geeks, namely me, but if they suit you feel free to use them.

1. I resolve to be a better co-worker.

I am not a bad person to work with, but there are times when all of us need a little motivation to be helpful to others.  I want to improve that.  Think of it as the “plays well with others” resolution.

2. I resolve to write more in the new year

I am going to do my best to crank out more content here, at TechRepublic, and wherever else the opportunity pops up.  Writing is fun… it just seems that other things, including Xbox 360 get in the way of that upon occasion.

3. I resolve to Learn more

This one is pretty broad, but in general increasing my knowledge of things tech and not seems like the right thing to do.

4. In relation to number 3 I am going to learn one piece of software and use it. 

Not sure which app I will choose but there will be at least 1 application that I get, learn, and use in 2010.

Because I am not generally able to keep/follow resolutions, I am going to quit while I am ahead and stick with those four this year.  Maybe putting them online for the world to see will help, assuming that the world is reading my stuff.

Happy New Year to all and make 2010 a great year!!

Now that the backup device and jobs to fill it have become the main focus of my work day, it seems I have also discovered that the root of the backup issues I am seeing stem from a locked tape drive.

I am not exactly sure what would cause the tape drive, in the middle of whichever job it chooses, to lock.  When this happens, the job runs… and runs… and makes no progress.  I guess understanding the root of the problem is good, but figuring out what causes a tape device to lock is another battle all together.  The tape is not full, there are enough tapes in the library to last for a good long time so I am really grasping at straws about the locking thing.

Digging through Bing and Google have not been much help either… I think figuring out this issue is going to be my goal for the week between the holidays.

If anyone has any thoughts about why a tape drive (used in a library) would lock, please share.

I have a few more backup and storage related post ideas coming in the new year, looking at the overall experience with the new Quantum Superloader, but I want to get it working completely and really understand it first…

I would also like to wish all of my readers, however many of you there are, a happy and safe holiday season.

Recently at my organization we ran out of room on our backup tapes, which was both good and bad.  Good because it allowed for a tape library and less messing around with tapes once I get the library and schedules and things figured out, and bad because we had to finagle a 2 tape backup configuration in the meantime.

Backups are getting done, but it has been quite the on going experience with the new Quantum SuperLoader.

The point of this post I guess is that I am slowly becoming a storage junkie, and that learning the best way to efficiently store data. 

It appears that the speed of backups with the new library is quite improved… still not perfect, but as I get a handle on it surely the performance and efficiency will improve.

If anyone, storage junkie or not, has any suggestions please pass them along.  I am curious to know more about storage and backup. 

I also wanted to thank the Microsoft Storage team for linking my blog.  Hopefully I will learn from that blog to help this blog improve.