Dallas police lose 8TB of data, impacting criminal cases

Re:Dallas police lose 8TB of data, impacting criminal cases by ocdtrekkie on Tuesday August 17, 2021 @02:30PM (#28213206)

It's very hard for some people to see and understand digital storage, in terms of capacity, redundancy, and reliability. Physical storage is very visual and very easy to understand: You put crud in a room and it sits there until someone does something with it.

One of the things I find nontechnical people tend to fail to understand is the importance of organizing and cleaning up data. Often when we are running out of space, I get asked why we can't just buy another hard drive at Best Buy for $50.

Then when people do clean up their data, they don't understand file space. They'll spend hours cleaning up old Word documents, but not touch the decade-old AVI video files which could at least be stored in a better format.

Ask a government entity to buy a SAN, they complain. Ask them to buy a backup storage appliance, they ask why we need another SAN. And then in five years, they ask why you need another SAN if you bought one five years ago...

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Re:Dallas police lose 8TB of data, impacting criminal cases by dylan604 on Tuesday August 17, 2021 @05:01PM (#28214819)

My favorite reference for comparing physical/digital storage was from a former co-worker of mine. Imagine your vault/storage/library with all of the shelves with their contents clearly marked and organized. Now, imagine someone knocking all of the stuff off the shelves and shoving it all into a large pile. That's your harddrive.

[ Parent | on HN ]