Storage

A phone screenshot of an error turned into a day of storage work: an audit of 4,921 pulled photo edits found 3,777 byte-identical to their originals, 108 GB reclaimed, a 3.4 TB library moved with an instant rename, and five separate ways a copy or a delete can lie to you.

A multi-day video conversion job hit two unrelated failures in one day, and both had the same shape: one broken precondition outside any file, turned by the script into thousands of fast, confident per-file failures. A circuit breaker, a pinned driver, and a watcher that looks at rates instead of names.

What started as moving two small apps to the control-plane machine became the complete retirement of a third machine as an application host. Dependency mapping first, an explicit 'park that one' that evidence later overturned, a symlink instead of rewriting a hundred thousand paths, 51 GB reclaimed, and two live credentials caught before they replicated.

A session meant to make a backup claim checkable first read the config wrong and nearly 'repaired' a healthy setup, then proved one restore, then opened an alarm about unbounded growth. The follow-up the same day measured the alarm and found two of its load-bearing facts wrong. Ruling: accept.

Three database backups written to network storage two weeks earlier were all zero bytes. The cause was an idle timeout on the mount tearing it down mid-write. The obvious retry then failed instantly for a second, unrelated reason, and the worker stopped and asked instead of improvising.

Hashing every size-collision candidate on my NAS found fifty-two thousand duplicate groups and about 254 GB reclaimable. The interesting part was everything that nearly made the number wrong.

Every cheap health check told me my storage link was perfectly healthy while it was actually running at a tenth of its speed, and the real work was proving which piece was lying.