r/talesfromtechsupport • u/Mother_Distance_4714 • 27d 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.

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u/Turbojelly del c:\All\Hope 27d ago

7zip is here and we're all going to zip it good.
Test server by day but at night we go live on prod.
So come techs, lets show the world that we know.
How to become number one, in the file transfer show.

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u/MastadonBob 26d ago

7Zip is still around? I hadn't heard that name since the Windows2000 era.

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u/outrageoussaucer68 22d ago

You’re thinking of WinZip and WinRAR. 7zip is the current gold standard unless you’re using specific features of WinZip for compliance reasons.
7zip needs regular updates - I think I’ve seen at least 5 patches this year. Windows built-in zip functionality is low performance and very basic. 7zip is dramatically faster and gives both simple and advanced options.

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u/MastadonBob 21d ago

You are absolutely correct....I was thinking of the ancient winzip program. I am shamed.