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

codinghorror.com

81–90 of 175 posts

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

#81
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.

I've learned never to trust anyone else with your critical data. I try and avoid doing sysadmin tasks (I hate it) and I pay for it but I make sure the backups are working and at least some copy is under my direct control.

Sometimes I'm extremely shocked at how cavalier professionals are at maintaining your data and I've worked with plenty.

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

#83
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.

If your a one-man show, you have to develop enough sysadmin skills for critical tasks such as offsite backup. I do have sympathy for Jeff, I'm certainly not laughing at him. Hope this is a strong message to the many out there not doing it right.

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

#84
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And do you think Jeff's blog just got less popular?

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

#85

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…

Thanks for the tip. I've been doing the same thing Atwood has been doing. So I just installed your stuff and have it running.

A tip for folks using leftnode's setup: I didn't notice $gpgRecipient hidden at the end of the config file and chased around a bit looking for it.

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

#86

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…

good outline. An alternative, which I use, is tarsnap http://www.tarsnap.com/.

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

#88
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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

Well, I sort of can:

http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:9vLV7YkK14sJ:www.codingh...

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

#89
post #85

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…

Thanks for the tip. I've been doing the same thing Atwood has been doing. So I just installed your stuff and have it running. A tip for folks using leftnode's setup: I didn't notice $gpgRecipient hidden at the end of the config file and chased around a bit looking for it.

Thanks for using it!

I use it to backup all of my databases and entire vhosts directory every hour and night.

Let me know if you find any bugs!

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

#90

I feel for him. But I wonder if this eventually turns out as a case study for "How to backup an entire site using the archives and search engine caches" I know it's hard; but everything is _there preserved_ anyway. So it _is possible_

I won't link it again in this thread, but check out Warrick. It's a tool to do just that.
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