I have shared my personal troubles when working with a server that is not on a proper backup routine. I also talked about another blogger who had similar problems not too long ago. Today, however, I read a truly sad story of how things can go really wrong when you don’t take backups seriously.
It started out pleasantly enough. I was just catching up on John Chow’s trip to China. Now I don’t read John’s blog regularly but I like to scim his RSS feed for interesting headlines. Well I found one today, “Hunting Pandas At The Shanghai Zoo“. Turns out it was just a video of him and his family at the zoo but the real gold was in the link to the “true life account” of how John had a rock fight with Pandas.
That was a funny post to read. I’ll be laughing about that one for a while. What about the backup post you promised? Just hold on, I;m getting there. I promise.
I decided to check out Carl’s blog (the third guy from the Panda story). Alright, here you go. This is the point of my article. the first post I see on Carl’s blog is an explaination that the data recovery company he sent his hard drive (after a server crash) was not successful in recovering any data.
So what is the magnitude of this loss? HUGE! He says he has lost 5 years worth of data for his personal blog as well as 10 years worth of data for his Surreal-News forum. Ouch! Among other data lost was sites of friends and family. That is a tough loss to take.
What can we learn from this? Carl says it himself. “never really intended to run many important sites from my server. I really should have set up RAID regardless.” That’s how it usually goes. You don’t intend to store important data but eventually it creeps onto the server and before you know it you’ve lost important data.
I wish Carl the best of luck in the future and hope he does imlement RAID like he says. You should setup up some nightly backup (at least weekly) software onto a seperate harddrive. Doing a weekly or monthly offsite swap (take a copy off site) is always good when possible.
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May 20th, 2008 at 12:50 am
You think we’re joking when we talk about John throwing rocks at baby pandas?
May 20th, 2008 at 2:27 am
On the contrary Ed. I believe every word. Life, after all, is stranger than fiction ;).
June 17th, 2008 at 10:28 am
Thats exactly right, and just like with everything else in life you don’t realize how important something is until you lose it : )
No backups or improper backups can be a total disaster. And you can’t really rely on the hosting company to backup your stuff. They all say they back it up, but you really don’t know what they are doing. One client of ours had lost their entire database: the hosting company said they back up their data, but when the database was gone, the hosting guys just said “sorry, can’t do anything about it”. (The client did manage to recover with an outdated copy). You should always do a backup yourself, at least once in a while, and store a copy of your data somewhere offsite.
June 17th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Great advice EE. It is hard to communicate how important backups are to a client until something goes very wrong. Unfortunately by then it is usually too late.