Up until a couple of weeks ago, my knowledge of technology began and ended with this fact: in order to restart an iPhone, one must press down and hold the power button. After starting my internship at Datto and training with Dan Newman, I’m happy to say that my knowledge bank has expanded significantly, but I’ll get to that later.
I was completely lost on my first day at Datto. When I say lost, I mean it in the most literal sense of the word. I was emailing someone in human resources to help me figure out where to park. After I squared away the parking, I made my way over to the security desk. The woman there greeted me as friendly as ever and helped me get the coffee stain out of my new top (my luck).
Three bathroom visits and a can of seltzer water later, I had begun my first day of training, wet top and all. I had no idea where I was going, but eventually found my way. There were folders and bags placed at each seat with our names on them. I found my spot and got started on my paperwork. One of the women from human resources came over and asked how it was going, probably because she saw me asking Eric, the poor kid who sat next to me, every question imaginable about how to fill out a W-4 form.
A few hours later, Dan was in the zone. He told us about every piece of the computer, which he compared to a kitchen. I had charts filled out, pages of notes describing what a virtual machine disk (VMDK) is and learned about how Backupify is going to save my butt next time I accidentally delete the wrong email. We went into the different types of backups, restoration options, the cloud, local and hybrid virtualization, and the difference between recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO).
As Dan went on, he noticed a few of our brains were turning to mush, and switched into conversations about dinosaurs! Everyone in training was divided up into teams and had to use Legos to build a dinosaur or develop a product to control dinosaurs. There were a lot of Legos. My group came up with an idea to make a nanotechnology pill that could control the dinosaur and save the human race. We won.
From there, we went deeper into Datto technologies such as Inverse Chain Technology and Screenshot Backup Verification. Later, we rejoined our groups for a few more activities and learned about Datto’s product suite.
Before I knew it, day 1 was over and I was on my way back home, calling my grandma to let her know that I would be doing a whole lot more than sitting in a cubicle and fetching coffee all summer.
To be continued…