Back Up

I just spent all day fighting a power outage that happened in our colocation facility. We managed to get all the machines back up and running correctly, except for one. The one that was just going on 1000 days of uninterrupted uptime, by the way, spoiled by Abovenet/DataPipe's interruptible Uninterruptible Power Supplies.

We lost a disk and some RAM from that system, and /usr/local/bin disappeared, and... it's a mess, pretty close to destroyed. The hero of the day is Allen, a friend of the company, who made a very long drive down to San Jose to help us out of a tough spot.

Anyway we did have backups of the data, I have moved the web site over to another machine, and the couple of mail accounts that are still stuck on there will be moved someplace else tomorrow, and then we can abandon that heap of junk to Abovenet/DataPipe when I abandon their facility sometime in the near future.

So that is a somewhat happy story, despite the loss of one day of my life. Here is what happens when you don't have good backups:

Business magazine fails to heed its own tech advice

NEW YORK: Business 2.0, the technology-aware magazine published by Time, periodically reminds readers of the importance of backing up computer files. A 2003 article likened backups to flossing - everyone knows it's important, but few devote enough thought or energy to it.

Last week, Business 2.0 got caught forgetting to floss.

On the night of Monday, April 23, the magazine's editorial system crashed, wiping out all the work that had been done for its June issue. The backup server failed to back up.

(International Herald Tribune)