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

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

#71

Post by jrockway »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #63
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.

And Duplicity, which cperciva claims is theoretically less secure, but which seems to work pretty well for me. (Who cares if the NSA can decrypt my blog backups? They are already available unencrypted...)

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

#72

Post by jrockway »

antirez wrote: post #37

I've backups of my silly blog antirez.com, this guy ran a business out of his blog and don't have external backups. The data is small, it is easy to transfer. It's almost unbelievable to me.

Did he? I thought Jeff had some "real job" in addition to blogging and Stack Overflow. I honestly doubt an occasionally-updated programming blog was putting the food on his table.

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

#73

Post by pronoiac »

icey wrote: post #21
sjs382 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Coding Horror experienced 100% data loss at our hosting provider, CrystalTech. I have some backups and I'll try to get it up and running ASAP!"

Read his newer tweets - his backups were just copies on the same server; they are gone as well, and now he's resorting to using internet caches to restore his content.

There are tools to retrieve data from Internet caches, like Warrick - http://warrick.cs.odu.edu/warrick.html .

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

#74

Post by jrockway »

dryicerx wrote: post #36

Oh The Irony This is really bad news for any service, but seriously... codinghorror.com (shakes head) Rule 16. If you fail in epic proportions, it may just become a winning failure.

System administration is not "coding".

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

#75

Post by mrduncan »

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…

Step 4, most importantly, should be to verify those backups on a regular basis. All too often, people lose data due to a failure and then a backup which was failing or corrupted.

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

#76

Post by pvg »

jrockway wrote: post #69
pvg wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, except he doesn't. Hence his tweets and his own recent question on stackoverflow about recovering his content from internet caches.

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

#77

Post by nkohari »

DTrejo wrote: post #53
nkohari wrote: post #7

To be fair, Atwood thought his hosting provider (CrystalTech) was backing up his system. As it turns out, their entire VM backup solution failed silently, so everyone thought the backups were being made. If anything, I'd say this is a sign not to work with CrystalTech.

If anything, I'd say this is a sign not to work with CrystalTech. After a mistake like this, it may be a sign that they will never mess up again.

We actually had our app hosted at CrystalTech until a couple months ago. Earlier this year, they had a critical power outage, which took our site offline. That's one of the reasons we're not there anymore.

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

#78

Post by robryan »

jrockway wrote: post #64
brk wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

I'd say a lot to Jeff, not only is it a popular blog standing alone and probably generates a decent income but it's also very important to him for cross promotion.

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

#79

Post by antirez »

jrockway wrote: post #72
antirez wrote: post #37

I've backups of my silly blog antirez.com, this guy ran a business out of his blog and don't have external backups. The data is small, it is easy to transfer. It's almost unbelievable to me.

Did he? I thought Jeff had some "real job" in addition to blogging and Stack Overflow. I honestly doubt an occasionally-updated programming blog was putting the food on his table.

I remember he blogging about making more money from the blog than from the work at some time and deciding to blog full time.

I guess I can not link to the blog post...

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

#80

Post by gaius »

jrockway wrote: post #74
dryicerx wrote: post #36

Oh The Irony This is really bad news for any service, but seriously... codinghorror.com (shakes head) Rule 16. If you fail in epic proportions, it may just become a winning failure.

System administration is not "coding".

That's splitting hairs. What's a backup script? What's a restore if not a unit test?
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