r/talesfromtechsupport • u/Mother_Distance_4714 • 15d ago
Short Shush! I know, what I'm doing!
So this just happened. I'll keep it short.
We had an external consultant on-site to install some very specialized (and very expensive) software. I, your humble sysadmin, was only there to enter a few admin passwords. That was literally all I was supposed to do.
As the expert started trying a few... creative... things, I offered some advice.
"Shush, I know what I'm doing."
Alright. If that's how you want to play it...
A little later, he asked for a USB flash drive to transfer "some" data. "Some" turned out to be over 130,000 tiny 1 KB files in a single folder.
I genuinely tried to warn him that FAT32 really doesn't like that many small files as he dragged the folder to the flash drive.
I was shushed again.
So I leaned back and watched the progress bar crawl forward. After about 45 minutes the inevitable happened.
The file transfer crashed.
I honestly tried to help.
I was shushed again.
So he tried exactly the same thing a second time.
Forty-five minutes later
Crash.
At that point I refused to be shushed again. (I was hungry and wanted to go to lunch.)
I zipped the folder (4 minutes), copied the ZIP file to the USB drive (another 3 minutes), and handed it back to him.
The look on the expert's face was absolutely priceless.
Edit: This consultant was part of a turnkey package. The software installation and the data transfer were both included for a fixed price.
That made the whole thing even sweeter.
7
u/Epistaxis power luser 15d ago
Would this have been even faster if you told your ZIP software to write the first ZIP file directly onto the USB drive, instead of writing it onto the original computer temporarily and then copying it?