Have you backed your work up lately?

[cd34]

I can't stress enough the value of an off-site backup.

Years ago, in a land far, far away, when I was a Lantastic/Novell guy (haha, bring back memories?), it was a dark and stormy night. No wait, that's something else. To set the mood: Cell phones were $59.95/month and $.65/minute.

Back in the day, in the DC/Baltimore corridor, when Lantastic or Novell didn't work, consulting companies called me. If you don't know what DC commuter traffic is like, picture 4 lanes of traffic where there should be 3 lanes, bumper to bumper, 2-5mph for about 6 miles. Once you got beyond that squeeze, you could usually get to 15mph in short bursts.

So, I was dealing with a direct client that I had, and was looking at my watch and seeing that it was 4:00pm on a Friday. Things were about wrapped up, and I was about to get a head start out of the city. My phone rang, (no caller id, phone was as big as a brick), I answered, and the lady said:

This is the blah blah, you did some work for for us through our normal consulting company -- they cannot come out and gave me your number, could you drop by for a few minutes?

I'm leaving the city near Wisconsin Avenue, they're next to Union Station. The only thing worse than rush-hour traffic in DC is crosstown traffic in DC.

I almost said no, but she said the printers weren't working and they had to get a document out. (This was a non-profit foundation that did its work for children -- How could I say no?)

I told her, I'm 8 miles away, I would guess it will take me 45 minutes to get there -- she said, No problem. So, 45 minutes later, I struggle to find a parking spot -- she's out on the street, offers to let me park in their driveway (DC has a strange townhouse/office community on the outskirts of the business district)

So, we go to a machine, and the fact it wasn't printing was only part of the issue -- she failed to mention that they couldn't even retrieve the document. Tthis was back in the day of Coax Ethernet (you remember that right, a break in the cable takes the entire network down). But something just didn't feel right -- because I could hit the alternate print server.

Aha, the main server had crashed. So, I ask her where the main server is and she said, I don't know. The closet where we keep it is empty and the only things left are a bunch of wires. We fired a guy today and shortly after he left, we couldn't print -- when do you think we'll be able to print and get our document?

I said, where is your backup tape? Oh, its in the server. How about last weeks? In the server. The other tape went bad so we use the same tape.

Long story short:

make backups
take one offsite
make more than 1 generation (i.e. if you back up data bad data on a hard drive, you have a copy of bad data)

If you're talking about your server, learn how to use mysqldump or pg_dump -- usually when you back up files, the databases aren't included.

If you have a lot of data, consider incremental backups. For your server, rsync will send only changed files.

PS, they did get 99% of the document back thank goodness to me having set up the default word perfect setup to write backups to their local drive.

I always told people -- You only need to save your document when you get to the point that you wouldn't want to retype since your last save.