To do data backups
And test your backups.
You don’t have backups until youve restored a backup.
What’s your process for testing it?
Depends on the kind of backup really
Just a folder full of duplicate files? Try to open them.
Having a drive image you can restore from? Take an extra drive and try to “restore” the contents of your backup onto it. You use the extra drive because if you just use your primary drive you may brick yourself.
There’s definitely types of backups I’m not covering here but you should do research into the type of backups you want to use and the restoration process, and basically try the restoration process intermittently.
I kinda got lucky. I wanted to install a new, bigger SSD. At the same time, I had been wanting to start doing backups, but was too lazy to set it up. Two birds, one stone. Set up backups, tested it by copying everything to the new SSD. Everything worked first try!
I used rsnapshot for backups. I made a little container that spins up, pulls my data, then shuts down. And then I made a script that does that and made cron jobs for it.
I once set an S3 lifecycle setting that accidentally affected 3 years worth of logs to Glacier. The next morning I woke up to a billing alert and an AWS bill with an extra $250k in charges (our normal run rate was $30k/month at the time). Basically I spent my entire add annual cloud budget for the year overnight.
Thankfully after an email to our account rep and a bunch of back and forth I was able to get the charges reduced to $4,300.
Is cloud even cheaper than managing your own infrastructure anymore?
The problem is having a competent team to manage your infrastructure. You can do a lot with a handful of people - but you need competences spanning a lot of areas, and finding that is pretty hard.
If you can get a competent team the only advantage cloud still has is the ability to quickly scale up and down - but if there might be a need for that it’d still be better to go hybrid, most on your own hardware, and just the prepared ability to quickly bring up cloud workers if needed. The cost savings of properly doing it yourself are so huge that it still might be cheaper to just have some pre-provisioned standby hardware for that, though.
Depends on your needs. If you expect to grow fast and unpredictably, or have extreme burst workloads (at my company it fluctuates between requiring ~10 cpus to ~50,000, and between 0 GPUs and dozens) or if you need several complex types of services and no people at hand who can manage them, it can be way cheaper. If you just need a few servers, a tape backup and a database, actual hardware has always been cheaper.
If I never have to buzz into another colo and stand in the exhaust of hundreds of servers again, it’s worth every single penny. If I never have to plan for capacity weeks to years in advance again, its worth every penny.
It depends on the workload. Some workloads do well on other people’s computers, some are better on your own computers. One size does not fit all.
I made this mistake but honestly? AWS is the most confusing clusterfuck of all time. I can’t stand it and refuse to use it for personal projects.
For me the problem came down to four conflicting sources on AWS regarding tiers and then another problem with the SDK. The SDK didn’t match the tiers at all so “archive” meant Glacier for some reason. 👎
Yeah luckily Amazon is good about mess-ups that are one-time like this. Was the cost because you were pushing to, or retrieving from Glacier?
Deleting from. We move logstores and I added an ageout policy for anything over 1 day, to “easily” empty a bucket overnight. I forgot that I had been cycling stuff to glacier after 6 months, and there were 3 years of logs in there.
was hanging out with friends getting some drinks, we decided to walk through our old campus.
there was a roof I always used to climb up while in college to chill on, so I did that.
after finished, while hopped up on liquid courage, I decided to jump down.
did so and shattered my heel.
spent the entire summer immobile and required a surgery that ended up costing me about $5k out of pocket.
have mostly recovered now, but it’s still not as good as the other foot, and I know it’s going to hurt like hell when i’m old.
don’t be like me, don’t do stupid shit while drunk.
I was about to joke about the fact that you have to pay for health, but then I saw that you’ve never recovered. I’m very sorry, buddy.
It’s not horrible, I can run and hike right now, just not at 100%.
what are you gonna do though
Alcohol. The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.
-Homer J Simpson
Did something somewhat similar. Got drunk after final exams. We decided we were special agents and were rolling over car hoods/bonnets (like they do in chases). There was a van (think A-Team), and since it doesn’t have much of a hood, I rolled off the roof instead.
Pretty sure I cracked or broke a rib (there was literally a loud pop). Couldn’t sit up, cough, sneeze, or breathe deeply for about 2 weeks without intense pain. I never went to doctor though because I thought, “well, it’s a rib, what are they gonna do? Put a cast around my whole body?”
Now I have discomfort every day, and pain between 2-3/10 after any sports. Tough when your youth idiocy catches up with you! Felt so invincible back then.
I’ll drink to that
If you have a four-year scholarship, for God’s sake, make sure you graduate in four years!
Or, as I did, don’t drop a class mid-term because it’s not going well and end up sliding into part-time status. Poof, scholarship gone. I woulda been better off taking the F.
Before buying your fitst home:
- bring someone with more experience than you to have a look at it, maybe even a professional
- scout out the area (on foot) during the day, evening and night
- visit local businesses like cafés, restaurants, bakeries etc.
- look at statistics like crime and air quality
- have a talk with the neighbors, get a sense of the community if you can, otherwise just observe while taking walks
- if applicable, call the home owner’s representative (or whatever the equivalent is where you live), ask them about the home, neighborhood, community, expenses, plans for the future etc.
- have a set budget of how much you want to spend on it before you move in, don’t overstep that amount
Nowadays if you do all those steps someone else will have bought the house before you’re done
That’s basically why you need an outstanding real estate agent.
Look at mister fancy pants who can buy a home.
Never let the car run out of gas. I was on the highway and the destination gas station was in sight. Well, even after putting more gas in from a Jerry can it wouldn’t start because debris clogged the fuel filter. Getting it towed + repaired was like $1000 when I could have just stopped at a gas station earlier.
That starting the work is half the work. I wasted a lot of time procrastinating, it took me shamefully long to realize that if I could just start an activity for 5 minutes, taking it to completion is then relatively easy
Not all landscapers can “landscape”. Hired a guy to build a pad for a shed which included a small retaining wall. The guy doesn’t own a level, and the end result is visibly not level. I showed him with my laser level what was going on, and he didn’t believe me. He started adding MORE material to the high spot.
He was aggressive about needing to be paid. Very aggressive. I paid him since he knows where we live. Unless we sue him and win, we’re out $4800, and to have it done correctly (with a fancier wall) will be $6500.
TLDR: Don’t hire a lawn service company to build anything.
That sucks, I’m sorry that happened. But landscapers are not concrete people. I will say that any of either profession I’ve dealt with were aggressive about payment. I wouldn’t be surprised if the guy tried to give you a change order for additional money?
It didn’t need any concrete, I hired him to do a stone wall. I didn’t want anything fancy, and had the whole thing been level I would have been happy enough with it.
thats when you take a fraction of the money you would have paid him, and buy security cameras for your house. High quality security cameras, with night vision.
Then contact a lawyer for damages to undo what he did.
I have a good 4M camera covering the entire front of our house already. Driveway, front yard, front door, etc. We’ll see if I take him to court. It’s really not worth the effort and time at this point, but it would be fun to waste his time even if I lose.
boy I wish I was rich enough to throw away thousands of dollars with a shrug and “To much effort to deal with it”
Damn bunch cynical people saying don’t get married. Maybe don’t get married to someone unless you’re sure, and get a prenuptial. There are advantages, legal and financially, of being married.
Everyone tends to extrapolate from their own experiences. My wife and I got married about a month after we met, for complicated reasons. We’ve been married for just over 20 years now. Mostly very happily! I don’t recommend our path to anyone, but the fact is that you just never know.
I wanted a newer car, so I rolled my existing auto loan into the newer vehicles loan. So easy right?
I was upside down on it for years and years. It’s so disheartening to drive a vehicle that’s falling apart and stranding you everywhere but still owe $10k on it. It was an awful decision that took years of pain but that was my lesson on buying things I can afford.
When I was a student I kept my books beside my bed on the floor. Got hammered one night, went to bed, felt sick and ended up being sick on all of my books on the floor. Probably about £500 worth of books which is a lot when you’re a broke ass student.
Art school isn’t worth it, period. I got a far better art education through my local community college by far, from instructors who weren’t incrediblely stuck up and full of themselves.
That was an 80k expense that I’m still paying off almost 20 years later, and I didn’t even finish my degree.
I went back to get my AS at a CC and took some art classes there. 10/10, far better instruction for a fraction of the price.
Don’t invest in crypto.
As an IT-worker, it’s not uncommon to test technology and scrap it due to bad results or unfit implementation. Usually this isn’t considered a waste, since there are a lot of things to learn in the process.
However, this one system which was designed for testing applications was a bit different. From the day we were told about it, basically every developer knew that this would be unfit. However the customers were firm on that it should be implemented. I’m not sure if it was because of the looks of the sales person or if it was a genuine incompetense that the decission was landed, but I felt a bit too junior to stand up against it. So about a month of work with 2 developers went down on something that every other developer knew would be scrapped. 2 devs at ~$100/hour, 4 weeks of 40 hours, so roughly $32,000.
The lesson was that I need to be more direct and firm when things like that is decided.
If you got paid, it’s not your lesson to learn.
True. It was an expensive lesson, but not expensive for me.
The legal system.
After having 3500 dollars worth of stuff stolen by my shit landlord. I went to court. Again And again And again And again.
Not accounting for my time, gas, parking, I spent over 5000.amd even after I “won” I still wound up goj back to court several times because this scum sucking asshole claims to be 100000 in debt to the government.
I hate the legal system more then I hate the guy who stole from me!
