1

I got home from the hospital (rota-virus, couldn’t keep anything down for 18 hours). Got it while at Mom’s house. Freelance stuff is getting behind.

Went to pull a few files off the server in the basement–no response. Long story short, the server drive had seized. Wouldn’t spin up. Tried everything I know (been doing this kind of thing for nigh on 20 years). It’s dead.

No problem. I shadow everything to another drive. Well, NTI Shadow had evidently crashed at some point, because the most recent files are from 3/14.

No problem. I have an external backup drive. I back up the USERS data folder there every night. I also have a cat. He likes the basement, and tight spaces where cables sometimes end up. The eSATA cable wasn’t connected to the server. Someone got behind there and dislodged it–I assume.

THE MORAL OF THE STORY: Your backups aren’t worth SHIT if you don’t monitor them and verify that they’re actually happening, and also readable, uncorrupted, and recent. One would think I’d have learned that long ago.

I’m tired and I hurt and my stomach feels like a rock. I can’t do this right now. I’m going to sleep.

2

Backups are my main job at present, so boy do I feel your pain. Get well soon.

3

That’s brutal, Acid. How bad off are you going to be with 11 days of missing data?

4

The one lesson I drill into all young DBAs is that no matter how much work you’ve done on backups, you have no usable backup strategy until you can

1.) Verify your backups.

2.) Test your restore strategy.

It’s shocking how many big enterprises put a ton of time and money into expensive and elaborate yet unverified backup plans and then get screwed when they need their backup the most.

5

Acid’s tale also points out another heuristic: A single copy is not a backup. I sync my school documents between my desktop and laptop, I mirror them to another two drives on my desktop (internal and external), a USB thumb drive, and Microsoft’s Live Mesh online storage.

I check the two main directories on the desktop and the laptop all the time, and I’ll check the USB thumb drive every once in awhile, but I’m going to be honest, I rarely check those other two local backups. Your tale of woe will change that.

Is there a program that will do that automatically?

6

Would a cloud backup have helped in this situation? Or are they just too risky?

7

You should really look into Dropbox…

8

Dropbox should look after most of your problems. If you use that and USB stick you should be fine back up wise.

It should also have the secondary benefit of helping you work on group projects alot easier.

-edit- Completely missed mandarin suggesting the same thing.

9

Yeah. I remember when my old company lost their accounts receivable database and the backups did not work. Took the accounting folks an entire month of going through paper records to reconstruct who owed us money.

The sysadmin got fired over that.

10

I’ve used Dropbox before. I prefer Live Mesh. It basically does the same thing, but it gives you more space and has some nice additional features. I find it also integrates better into Windows.

I meant are there any recommendations for checking the integrity of the locally mirrored files. I use SyncToy to mirror.

11

I use Mozy. It makes it really easy to check the status in terms of last time a backup was performed, how big it was, what files are backed up, etc. It warns me if it hasn’t been able to do a backup in X number of days where X is user configurable.

The one time I had a horrible system outage, the restore from Mozy worked fine, got everything back. It took longer than I would have liked because the backup set was large (over 100 gig) and I had to redownload that all over the Internet at whatever speed Mozy caps downloads at (you can get quicker restores from them via an extra-cost DVD burning services).

Granted, this isn’t a solution for big enterprises, but I do recommend checking out Mozy or one of the Mozy-alikes for at-home backups.

FWIW, I also use Live Mesh, but more for sync (of code, etc) than backup since the 5 gigabytes of network storage it gives you isn’t very much for RAW photos and other such things.

12

If you’re not really interested in the online storage you get with Live Mesh or the remote connection part of it, I gotta recommend Windows Live Sync. I think it’s just a much better device syncing program. It’s maybe not as full-featured as Syncback, but it’s free and easier to setup and use. You can actually view the progress of files being synced, and it just gives you better overall control. Now why Microsoft don’t combine Live Mesh (device syncing, 5GB online storage, remote connection), Live Sync and SyncToy (better overall device syncing applications), and Skydrive (25GB online storage) is beyond me. I’m guessing these departments don’t even know each other exist.

13

Why didn’t you get an error message stating the backup device wasn’t found?

Hope you feel better soon. Losing your lunch AND your data sucks.

14

There are persistent rumors that they will release a combination of all of these technologies (as “Live Wave 4”) sometime this year.

15

Wumpus lost all the data from his blog server at one point. While he kept backups, they were on the same server that went down. Off-site backups are a must if you have a mission-critical server.

16

Forgot to mention – while I pretty much just use Live Mesh for sync and not cloud storage, I do like the way having that cloud backing makes it really simple to sync many devices regardless of which ones are turned on… like if my home system is turned off and I edit files on my work desktop, shut that off and go back home and boot up my home system, Live Mesh will still sync me to the latest versions of the files I changed that day. Even though my work system is now off the latest changes will have been synced to the Live Desktop in the interim (assuming, of course, the folder is set to sync to the Live Desktop).

AFAIK with Live Sync the connection is p2p only and that situation doesn’t work as smoothly.

I also like the integrated firewall-friendly RDP functionality Mesh has.

17

Most modern backup programs can email a report of the success or failure of the backup which may have helped Acid in this case.

I’ve switched from Acronis to Macrium Reflect this year and I have never looked back. Macrium is only $39 and it runs on server OS! Unlike the other big names like Shadowprotect, Acronis, etc these guys do not charge hundreds more just to run on a server…

Macrium does data backup as well as images (can do incrementals/diffs). It’s fast and runs in Windows environment just fine. Can make rescue CDs in Linux, Bart, and WinPE.

For offsite backup/sync I use Sugarsync. Never had any serious issues and have never had to recover huge amounts of data so I’m not sure how good it will be for that (most of these online backups are really slow at restoring).

I’m looking into Logmein Backup as well for my business as well as my customers. It’s a sort of hybrid local/offsite/online system that seems to cover all bases. The main advantage is that you may be able to restore from an offsite backup MUCH quicker in the event of a disaster since you control and have physical access to the backup server/NAS/whatever.

18

CCZ … I took a look at LiveMesh after your post. I currently use DropBox which does sort of the same thing. I guess the difference with LiveMesh is that you don’t need to copy the files into a specific folder? Any other differences worth noting?

I’m all about auto-magically syncing data. I’ve been loving DropBox…

19

Both sync to an online storage area and then sync the devices, that’s the real common feature. LiveMesh gives you more space with a free account (5GB vs. 2GB), includes a remote desktop feature (which is really easy to use), and integrates better into Windows. You can set any folder as a LiveMesh folder anywhere on your system, there’s no one mandatory directory that everything has to be kept in. I think those are the main differences. I haven’t used it in awhile, but the actual Dropbox application is maybe a bit better. Does it actually show you a sync queue? LiveMesh will only show that it’s syncing, a generic progress indicator, and the current file being synced.

20

DropBox puts a little icon on each file in it’s folder so you can see which one is syncing or whatever, but you don’t get a progress bar or anything like that.