Nothing like minor heart attacks

I'm sitting in the back room right now, next to the servers, working on getting ejabberd functional. My phone rings.

"The S drive is empty. What happened?"

"I don't know, let me see."

For future information, the S drive is commonly called 'files'. It's a mapped network drive. It contains, surprise, all of the company's working files. You know, all of them. And, what's more, save about 6 folders, it is indeed empty.

"Well, you're right about one thing. They sure are gone."

"I know that, where'd they go?"

I doubt many of you know now NTFRS works (NT File Replication Service). It works amazingly well, and it happens to be incredibly smart in actually replicating the correct files in case of a collision (it has yet to overwrite the wrong file). But, it's also amazingly STUPID. Like, I want to physically hurt you stupid. It can't tell that a file has moved. It can only see that file X has disappeared, and now here's file Y in another place. It doesn't checksum the files or anything, it just knows that one file has disappeared, and a new one has been made in another place.

And, well, when someone moves a good 40,000 files that equate to about 10GB - over a T1, that takes a very, very long time to replicate.

A very long time.