audit’s thoughts.

Multiple Backups are important

September 10th, 2008 | by admin |

And let me tell you why this is. Our family photo album had 8 years of photo’s online, we lost 98% of them at home when we had a power surge that fried my main server that fried the hard drive also, we weren’t worried because they were online for family and close friends to see. I had thought they were being backed up each night with the rest of the server until yesterday. For some reason all the albums were gone from the server. Now I wasn’t about to panic because I figured they were backed up until I hear from my buddy who setup the backup, I guess the home directories weren’t being backed up due to a issue with symlinks, that is where my heart jumped up to my neck. Yep, 8 years of photo’s all gone. I was luck enough to have a few directories from recent years on another drive and was able to restore those but it still doesn’t make up for all the other photo’s.

So now I’m working on trying to make sure that I have MULTIPLE backups of all our photo’s in different places so if this happens again, I’ll be able to reupload them again. The hard part is, there were a LOT of rare pictures in the albums that we’re never going to see again of our kids and my wife’s step father. We also lost a few vacation albums. Now I know that people are thinking that I should’ve had them on more then 1 location and I did. That was until I found out that my wife threw the external hard drive out that I had a lot of stuff on because she didn’t see me using it so thought it was garbage.

I was up thinking about this problem last night and trying to think about any other locations that the photo’s could be at, I tore about the den closet, checked every drive I could find and nothing, yes I know i could take the server offline and do a data recovery on the drive but because I also host multiple sites on the server, I’m unable to suffer downtime. At least all the hosted sites are backed up. So today I’m going to work on setting up another backup plan for all things important on the server to me, it can’t hurt to have multiple backups.

So anyone that thinks they are safe, check and double check again. My wife is very upset because of all the missing photo’s but there’s nothing that can be done right now so the best we can do is to make sure this doesn’t happen again.