Imagine this: You wake up to find that your web server and your backup server have both been hacked. You have lost all of the data that your company has spent the last 13 years accumulating. Because of poor choices for backups, that just happened to AVSIM.
I have been doing system administration for over 30 years and I can be fanatical about the backups. (Ask any of the folks who work for me how testy I get when their machines are not fully backed up daily.) I have been burned by faulty backups and know the pain. Back in 2001, my laptop was stolen and everything was backed up except my Zemon family genealogy research. It took years to recover from that disaster. My first hard lesson came in 1980 when our PDP-11/70 crashed and I had to fly from Los Angeles to San Jose so that I could use a sister project’s similarly equipped PDP-11/70 to rebuild our boot disk. That was an expensive crash: a dozen people lost use of their computer for three business days.
I chose Verio as our hosting partner for many reasons, one of which is the excellent backups provided with every hosting account.
- All of the disk drives are “mirrored,” meaning that if one drive fails, the computer keeps running using the second drive; no data are lost.
- Every night, the entire machine is copied to a backup disk and the backup remains available as “read-only” files until the next night when they are overwritten by a new backup. Anyone hosting a web site from us can recover files from these nightly backups for free. I cannot count the number of times these backups have saved the day when the phone rang and the panicked voice on the other end said, “I messed up and deleted a file….”
- Every week, the entire machine is copied to tape and two or three weeks’ worth of tapes are kept in a vault. These, too, are accessible by clients though there is a fee to cover the labor of manually retrieving the tape from the vault. These, too, have saved several clients’ butts over the years.
For clients who want more security, we offer an add-on service, Nest Egg Backup for Web Servers, which provides 30 days of backups of every file on the server.
Few other hosting companies can help you if you accidentally delete a file or need to quickly put your web site back to the way it was yesterday. If you don’t know whether your hosting provider protects you, call and ask them.
Update: Scott and Candy just pointed out a problem with the home page of our site which had been there for several weeks without anyone here noticing it. (Who looks at the home page of his own web site?) Using Nest Egg Backup for Web Servers, I quickly restored the missing code from a file which has not been on our server since April 23, almost a month ago.
How important are backups to you? How would you feel if you lost your entire web site could not get it back?
