Geek Daily

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.

Ever get the feeling that the universe is against you, or at least your computer hates you? Do you know where I am coming from? We have all had those days. I know I sure have but today I want to focus on the misfortune of a fellow blogger, not to kick him while he is down, but to offer some advice and encouragment for the future.

I enjoy reading the posts by Jim over at Blogging Startup. He posts about the ups and downs of blogging and new startups.

Today I saw his post and immediately felt his pain. He has had a rough week finished off with a hard drive crash with only a two week old backup. Talk about a final kick to the teeth. What’s worse his latest work project, that was due today, was completely wiped out in the crash.

Now I hear some of muttering to yourself, “why didn’t he have a more current backup?” Well that is easier said than done and Jim even vows now to do daily backups. I left a comment for Jim pointing out the flaw in his noble intentions. That flaw being himself. We, as human beings, eventually get lazy or we just forget and the universe sees these slip ups and sees fit to punish us at that exact moment.

I too have been in this same boat. I used to run my own web server that hosted my blog, an old one, not this one, as well as my current projects on the go. I enjoyed running my server and learn a lot from setting it up but failed in one area, backups.

I tried to tell myself I would make daily backups but the truth of the matter is I didn’t and wouldn’t you know my hard drive crashed and took my backup drive along with it. So unlike Jim I had nothing, not even a two week old backup, nothing!

I scrambled for the next couple weeks re-doing a project for a client that was nearly done and ended up a week late which didn’t impress them much. Oddly, they have never called me to do another project <sarcasm/>. You see, they identified the flaw in the situation, me! I had failed to take proper care in handling my data, and theirs. I should have had more fail safes in place.

Today I do not do my own hosting altough I am perfectly capable. I just don’t have any interest in spending the money and time in implementing proper backup that hosting requires.

Now back to Jim. I suggested he buy himself an extra hard drive and get some mirroring software to protect himself from repeating this same mistake in the future. Upon writing this post I pin pointed a flaw in my advice. What if the backup drive fails like it did for me?

I want to add to that advice and say go one more step further. Buy a third drive and an external enclosure (USB external hard drive) and have the backup routine included semi regular backups to the external drive as well. The chances of three drives frying on you at the same time are slim.

So Jim, you have my sympathy, but now you are on the hook to protect yourself for next time. Really there is no excuse from us not to learn from the mistake the first time around. Unless you enjoy these type of things ;).