Before Christmas, I experienced the nightmare of all webmasters. A hard disk on one of my servers went bad and I was unable to mount it.
- Oh well, I thought, that's not a big problem. I have a nightly backup.
When I called the hosting company - I was confident I had a couple of hours worth of work ahead of me. Boy, was I in for a shock...
As I spoke to the support guy, it was soon discovered that the last backup of the disk in question was taken October 1st! Almost three months ago! I couldn't believe my ears.
The server in question is my own. The server does not have RAID, so I've been paying this company to do a backup of the server every night. This has not worked. Apparently, the backup system had lost contact with my server on October 1st, and the company had failed to pick up this error. Not exactly a fool-proof system... :(
Some Light in the Tunnel
Happily, all of the databases were on a different disk. So most of the information was intact. The website files were on the faulty disk.
Also, most of the sites on this particular server are updated quite infrequently. So there wasn't too much information lost. The worst thing that happened was that a credit card module in one of my own Virtuemart solutions was not working. This created some extra work for me, following up on customers who were unable to pay using their credit card.
It could have been so much worse. If another disk had gone bad on this server, the databases would have been lost. THAT would have been a costly experience.
Lessons Learned - the Hard Way...
- Don't assume there's an automatic backup going - check it regularly (set an appointment in your calendar to remind you)
- Check it again ;)
- Set up redundancy - do regular additional backups yourself . Both of the webiste files and databases.
- Always keep your databases and web site files on different disks, if you're not on a RAID system (you should be).
- Install JoomlaPack and LazyBackup on all your Joomla sites.
PS.
It's not on the server on which I have JoomlaBlogger that this happened.
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