The Grumpy IT Admin

Android, oh my god really? I tried, really, I tried very hard, but a combination of Android craziness and Lenovo ineptitude just made it so hard I couldn’t be bothered. In fact, the combination of the two made Microsoft look positively stunning in their slickness of updating and a paragon of patching. In the windows world Microsoft delivers updates to all manner of hardware mixes without a pause for breath. You may not want them, but you get them anyway and since Windows 10 you get OS updates on the fly for free as long as your chipsets are supported, but it is quite a long term support, 7 or 8 years at the shortest, normal 10 or more. With Android, you are lucky if you get 2 years for OS updates if you are lucky and security patches, I really don’t as I have yet to work out how to find out. So what produced this anti-android rant? Trying to update my Wife’s Yoga Tablet (less than 1 year old) from 5.1 to 6. Yes, I know the latest Android version is 8.0 but due to the unique ...

Backup retention periods seem to be driven by urban myths and how systems worked in the 1970s. Not wholly surprising since most back up software still seems to be stuck in that period and most sales pitches are urban myths. So how long do you keep backups for (this is the easy starter question) 10 years, 7 years or even forever? Do you keep you daily backups for that long or only your monthly or yearly ones? Why (don’t you just hate it when someone says why) have you chosen that time period? Was it because someone in the business said there was a law that said they had to keep some data for that time? What happens to stuff that was created and then deleted between your backups tapes? Have they ever shown you the law that states that? My first question is where is the data kept? Most HR/finance/legal systems likely to have a data retention requirement store data in a database these days and the data covers the last seven years or whatever is the legal requirement or for w...