Coding Horror and blogs.stackoverflow.com experience "100% Data Loss" • Hacker News Board

Re: Coding Horror and blogs.stackoverflow.com experience "100% Data Loss"

#61

Post by gaius » Fri, Dec 11, 2009, 9:24 PM UTC

pavs wrote: post #42

gaius wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is SOP in the real world.

Yup jokes aside. If you are not doing external backups and checking it at least once a month, you are doing it wrong. You can blame your host as much as you want, its equally your fault. I learned it the hard way.

As I said in another thread, if you regularly refresh your development environment from your production backups, you get them verified "for free" and your ops people get plenty of practice, you never have to run a "DR exercise" to know you can.

Re: Coding Horror and blogs.stackoverflow.com experience "100% Data Loss"

#62

Post by agb » Fri, Dec 11, 2009, 9:24 PM UTC

leftnode wrote: post #22

1. Register an Amazon AWS S3 account - https://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/developer/registration/... 2. Download my S3 backup script (or anyone's S3 Backup script) - http://github.com/leftnode/S3-Backup 3. Set up a cron to push hourly/daily/whatever tar's of your vhost's directory to S3. Spend, like, $10 a month. Thats 30gb of storage, 30gb up and 30gb down. Now, I know that may not be a lot, but I doubt codinghorr…

If you push your backups, make sure the account used does not have permissions to modify or delete the files it is creating offsite.

Re: Coding Horror and blogs.stackoverflow.com experience "100% Data Loss"

#63

Post by mechanical_fish » Fri, Dec 11, 2009, 9:24 PM UTC

leftnode wrote: post #22

1. Register an Amazon AWS S3 account - https://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/developer/registration/... 2. Download my S3 backup script (or anyone's S3 Backup script) - http://github.com/leftnode/S3-Backup 3. Set up a cron to push hourly/daily/whatever tar's of your vhost's directory to S3. Spend, like, $10 a month. Thats 30gb of storage, 30gb up and 30gb down. Now, I know that may not be a lot, but I doubt codinghorr…

There's also tarsnap, run by HN's very own cperciva.

Re: Coding Horror and blogs.stackoverflow.com experience "100% Data Loss"

#64

Post by jrockway » Fri, Dec 11, 2009, 9:30 PM UTC

brk wrote: post #31

dnsworks wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you fail to audit and test your disaster recovery procedures on a regular basis, then you fail at competently maintaining your infrastructure. No excuses.

Yes, but I'm not sure if your comment is targeted at CrystalTech or codinghorror? You can't outsource liability. If YOU are not testing YOUR backups. YOU fail.

It's a blog. How much time and money is worth spending on this?

(I backup my Slicehost account with their official service. If they die and my backup dies with it, that's fine; I don't have the time or money to do anything better.)

Re: Coding Horror and blogs.stackoverflow.com experience "100% Data Loss"

#65

Post by kalid » Fri, Dec 11, 2009, 9:31 PM UTC

PStamatiou wrote: post #26

leftnode wrote: post #22

1. Register an Amazon AWS S3 account - https://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/developer/registration/... 2. Download my S3 backup script (or anyone's S3 Backup script) - http://github.com/leftnode/S3-Backup 3. Set up a cron to push hourly/daily/whatever tar's of your vhost's directory to S3. Spend, like, $10 a month. Thats 30gb of storage, 30gb up and 30gb down. Now, I know that may not be a lot, but I doubt codinghorr…

I do the same thing, with a script using ruby s3sync I wrote a while ago (that I should probably update): http://paulstamatiou.com/how-to-bulletproof-server-backups-w...

Just wanted to say thanks for the article -- I'm using your script for my blog :).

Re: Coding Horror and blogs.stackoverflow.com experience "100% Data Loss"

#66

Post by pvg » Fri, Dec 11, 2009, 9:31 PM UTC

nollidge wrote: post #39

scott_s wrote: post #5

Let me get this right: the guy who ran a site whose entire purpose is to make fun of other people's poor programming practices has no external backups?

I think you're thinking of Daily WTF. Jeff's blog is/was just a programming blog. He also frequently said he was the world's worst coder, so...

Well, he did make sure to tell us to shut up, stop what we're doing and make a back-up. Because he knows things, you see:

http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:2HHNAk2SB6EJ:www.codingh...

Re: Coding Horror and blogs.stackoverflow.com experience "100% Data Loss"

#67

Post by jrockway » Fri, Dec 11, 2009, 9:31 PM UTC

scott_s wrote: post #5

Let me get this right: the guy who ran a site whose entire purpose is to make fun of other people's poor programming practices has no external backups?

Programming is not system administration. As a programmer, I learned long ago that I can pay people to keep systems up, and that they do better than me and cost less than me.

Handling a failing disk is the job of a sysadmin, not a programmer.

Re: Coding Horror and blogs.stackoverflow.com experience "100% Data Loss"

#68

Post by carbon8 » Fri, Dec 11, 2009, 9:32 PM UTC

leftnode wrote: post #22

1. Register an Amazon AWS S3 account - https://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/developer/registration/... 2. Download my S3 backup script (or anyone's S3 Backup script) - http://github.com/leftnode/S3-Backup 3. Set up a cron to push hourly/daily/whatever tar's of your vhost's directory to S3. Spend, like, $10 a month. Thats 30gb of storage, 30gb up and 30gb down. Now, I know that may not be a lot, but I doubt codinghorr…

I recently moved some servers over to this for encrypted daily s3 backups:

http://github.com/astrails/safe

Dead simple to specify what to backup, drop the config in /etc/safe and add a cron job.

Re: Coding Horror and blogs.stackoverflow.com experience "100% Data Loss"

#69

Post by jrockway » Fri, Dec 11, 2009, 9:33 PM UTC

pvg wrote: post #66

nollidge wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're thinking of Daily WTF. Jeff's blog is/was just a programming blog. He also frequently said he was the world's worst coder, so...

Well, he did make sure to tell us to shut up, stop what we're doing and make a back-up. Because he knows things, you see: http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:2HHNAk2SB6EJ:www.codingh...

The site says he has a backup, right? So it sounds like he ... does have a backup.

Re: Coding Horror and blogs.stackoverflow.com experience "100% Data Loss"

#70

Post by mhartl » Fri, Dec 11, 2009, 9:33 PM UTC

Redundancy, people. All my really important data lives in at least three (and often more) of the following eight places: (1) my current MacBook Pro; (2) my legacy Linux box; (3) my external USB drive; (4) my personal (Slicehost) server; (5) Dropbox; (6) Mozy; (7) Heroku; (8) GitHub. Wow, that was even more than I expected. Did I mention redundancy?