This government agency does lots of time-critical and space-consuming analyses, and with multiple people using each data set, it’s a version-control challenge, says an analyst pilot fish on the scene.

“Then the boss called a meeting to tell us his great idea: Every analyst team should place all its files for any project, including backups, into a single master folder,” fish says. “That way, according to the boss, we’ll maintain better version control.

“I respectfully disagreed. Make sure our backups are on a different physical disk from the main files, I urged. That way, when a disk crashes, we can immediately restore from backup and keep working. And we can maintain version control with a coherent logical structure that doesn’t force everything onto one physical drive.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here