Back Up Your Servers!

March 26th, 2009 by Chris

I’ve talked about this before, but, it would seem a timely reminder is on hand.

Some malicious hacker attacked WebHostingTalk, one of the oldest and most popular webmaster discussion forums. He deleted the offsite backups, the onsite backups, and then deleted the database. The attacked seemed to be purely malicious.

WHT is now having to rely on a hard copy backup from October. Like in Battlestar Galactica (such a lame finale, by the way), all the networked options were compromised and only the older technology, the Galactica, survived. The hard copy.

Do you have hard copies of your important files and databases stored in a hard copy in multiple locations? How regularly do you do them? I don’t, I’m afraid to say. My databases are backed up nightly, and uploaded to third party storage, but an actual hard copy I don’t have, or rather, I haven’t made one since probably 2006. I need to get on this, and this is a timely reminder for me, and you.

At the very least everyone should set up their server to upload a copy of all backups to a second server or third party regularly like I do. It didn’t help WebHostingTalk, but their case was extreme. There are lots of such services out there, or you can just use a regular hosting account. One such service I’ve seen advertising a lot lately is Mozy.com. Amazon, I believe, also offers storage options, and some hosts offer backup specific accounts.

No related posts.

Posted in: Website Management »  by: Chris

2 Responses to “Back Up Your Servers!”

  1. cpc  Says:
    April 2nd, 2009 at 12:05 am

    Chris,

    How do you manage the backups on your site? Do you just have some cronjob that scp files over to your other servers? Or do you have some homegrown or commercial software that handles it? Thanks.

  2. charlie  Says:
    April 28th, 2009 at 8:39 am

    I use carbonite for my laptop (liky mozy, backs up in the background), which will be default include much of the coding and data for my sites, as I keep a copy there.

    As well as nightly backups to third party servers, I also periodically back up everything to remote hard disk. The last time I did this was at the start of the year, but it ttok a good while to do manually (and to check the backup was complete) and that is starting to seem a long time ago now.

Leave a Response








(Email field must be filled in)

Top of page...