‘Way back in the day, we lost the City of Minneapolis Web site when a hard disk crashed. “Not to worry,” sez the IT guys. “We’ll drop in a new hard disk and restore from the latest backup.” New disk goes in, fine. Backup tapes are located… no data. Yep, the night crew had been swapping tapes for months but no one had bothered to verify that the backup program was working.
Oops…
Turns out I had been keeping a full backup of all changes on my PC, and this was in the early days when I was the only publisher, so my cut of the site was up to date, and we were back in business quickly.
Flash forward to the present, when we’re all so much more prepared. (Right? aren’t we more prepared?) My service provider lost a disk array a few months ago, and they were able to restore everything, but it took them days to do it because of some backup problem. Now I read about the Verizon outage in Southern California, with a casual comment in the article that the backup system didn’t deploy (Verizon staff are looking into why, so they say…).
Bottom line: systems fail. If you don’t have regular backups of your site, get a system in place. If you do, check it to be sure it really works.
