There you are, minding your own business, when your hard drive starts to make that suspicious grinding sound. Or you discover that your laptop is not where you left it. Or your web hosting provider suffers a catastrophic data loss.
No sweat, you say. I’m a ProfHacker reader, and so I’m all about the backups. (If you’re not yet all about the backups, you might take a moment to check out some of our posts on backing up your stuff, including Annual Reminders–Backup, Back Up Your Essential Files Using Dropbox, How to Back Up Your Cloud, Backing Up a Campus Email Account, A Few Ways to Back Up Your Website, and Backing Up Your Social Network, among others.)
Suffice it to say that this is not the moment at which you want to discover that your carefully laid backup plan isn’t working.
A while back, I wrote about the importance of backing up your WordPress blog, an issue I’d mostly been alerted to when our new co-author, Mark Sample, suffered a massive data loss thanks to a misplaced floor mat. (No, really.) So I wrote about the WP-DB-Backup plugin and felt all kinds of smug for having found a secure way to ensure that my hosted data would be safe, should something so untoward ever befall me.
Catastrophic data loss laughs at such smugness. Mark popped up in the first comment on that post letting me know that he’d been using WP-DB-Backup, but that the files that the plugin had been sending him were empty.
Fortunately, Mark was able to get his websites restored, but I’ve taken two points away from his horrifying tale:
1. Redundancy is key.
It’s vital that you back up your files twice—not just to two different locations, but in two different ways—just in case one of those systems fails. As I keep all my files synchronized via Dropbox, I’ve got one cloud-based backup available on their server (with versioning, in case I need to restore an older version of a file), but I also use Backblaze as a second automated off-site backup, and I use Carbon Copy Cloner to maintain one on-site bootable clone of my hard disk.
The belt-and-suspenders approach might seem a bit much, but if one ever fails, the other will become crucial. As Mark said in his comment, if it’s worth backing up, it’s worth backing up twice.
2. Check your backups.
Just as important, however, is making sure that the things you think are being backed up are actually being backed up. Once a month, as Mark recommends in his comment, you should go into those backup files and make sure they’re really there, that they’re really up to date, and that they’re really accessible. Test your cloned hard drive to make sure it’s really bootable, download a file from your remote backup system to make sure it’s readable, and generally make sure that you’re actually saving the information you think you’re saving.
The short version: a little paranoia now can save you tremendous amounts of trouble later. The moment when you’ve already lost data is not the moment you want to discover that your failsafes have failed as well.
Your turn: how are you ensuring that your data will be there when you need it? Let us know in the comments!
[Creative Commons licensed photo by Flickr user moominsean.]
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11 Responses to Check Your Backups
samplereality - August 17, 2010 at 11:48 am
Thanks for the timely reminder to check your own backups. As you can imagine, I’ve learned the hard way to do this, and I’m fortunate that I was able to recover everything. I stood to lose years of blog posts, but even more painfully, years of my students’ blog posts, which I host on my own server.My current backup system is very similar to what you describe: WP-DB-Backup emails me a zipped database file every 48 hours, and I archive them in Gmail. But not without first occasionally testing the compressed files. I also use a CRON job to archive the static files on my server (images, audio clips, etc.).I should clarify about the “misplaced floor mat” that I joked was the cause of my web hosting service’s catastrophic data loss. It wasn’t really a floor mat that caused the problem (it was an unwarranted and unintended trigger of the data center’s fire suppression system), but the varying explanations the company gave sounded awfully similar to the excuses Toyota was giving in congressional testimony that very week (i.e. “misplaced floor mats” were causing unintended and deadly acceleration in Toyota’s cars).Making little jokes like that (and this) were the only way I could deal with the increasingly bleak news coming from my hosting service that week. Even after my server was revived against all odds, I couldn’t help making more jokes. Which leads me to a final point: no matter how devastating it might be to lose years’ worth of work, it’s essential to keep the loss in perspective. Humor was the way I did that, but our ProfHacker readers might have other coping mechanisms worth sharing.
kfitz - August 17, 2010 at 12:24 pm
Wow, thanks for the clarification, Mark. This all must have happened during a spectacularly literal moment in the semester; I saw all your tweets go by, culminating in the floor mats one, and didn’t even make the Toyota connection.In any case, a sense of humor in all this is absolutely necessary; thanks for that reminder as well!
tee_bee - August 17, 2010 at 5:24 pm
I use syncplicity to sync my office desktop, home desktop, and work laptop. I also back up the office backup to a 1 TB WD external HDD. I just got a Toshiba portable HDD that I will use for the home desktop. And, if all else fails, the files are on the Syncplicity servers, which have their own redundant backups. I really am all about the backups.
daveapostles - August 18, 2010 at 7:33 am
Being a Linux and PC-BSD user, I don’t bother about backing up system and apps – they can be restored from scratch in under an hour. I just place my data files on an external HD located elsewhere through a Tonido Plug (also Linux).
bergtrom - August 18, 2010 at 7:45 am
I keep an MS-Word file called “Test for Backup XXX” on my desktop and in mydocuments. XXX is the date, which I update once a month. I simply look for this file on my backup drives every few weeks. Thanks to this article, I will be looking to supplement these external hard drive backups with off-site, web-based backup servers in the future.
zalodek - August 18, 2010 at 9:49 am
I (foolishly) relied on the university’s backup of my (university) laptop. My HD failed and I found that the backup had not been working for months. Arrrgh! I lost a lot of data and work. I also discovered what it takes to get the files back – a requisition and about a week of waiting. Hrrrrmmmph. However, I am very happy with the Mozy backup of my desktop at home, not only do I have complete backups twice per day which I can verify, but I can pull up any file on the desktop (with appropriate security) anywhere in the world where I have access to a computer and the Internet.I have since begun backing up the files on my university computer at my own expense….. Thanks for the very timely reminder to check backups.
emmadw - August 18, 2010 at 12:16 pm
ONe point, though about backups (and seeing several recent posts re. the worth or not as the case may be of lots of technology in class!) is that electronic ones are relatively easy to do – as long as you remember. When colleagues have asked me about student work & what they should do if the server goes down etc., I generally promptly ask them what they did as students to protect their handwritten notes from hungry dogs/choclatey babies/flooding baths. Strangely, they rarely did! At least we now have a comparatively easy way to do it.
dld18 - August 18, 2010 at 12:32 pm
I share an office and computer with three other faculty. If I sync Dropbox (or another storage service) with this office computer, will it upload everything or can I select only certain drives/files?
kfitz - August 18, 2010 at 12:50 pm
@dld18: I can only speak to Dropbox here, but basically it will upload anything that gets put in the Dropbox folder, which is created when you install the software. If there’s any way for you to convince your IT support folks, you might see if they can create separate user accounts on that computer for each of the four of you; that way, you can share the machine without all of your files being exposed to your colleagues — and you can rest assured that the only files being uploaded to Dropbox are your own files, from you own user account.
billso - August 18, 2010 at 3:52 pm
You can always run a cron job and store ZIPs or other archives to Dropbox. Make sure your cron job includes hidden files.
jabberwocky12 - August 21, 2010 at 2:10 am
At a previous institution, I ran a small web-based project. For that project, I hired a tech person who just happened to be paranoid about backing up the server.He tied our server to the institution’s backup/restore system, and then tested the backup and restore of our server. The backup seemed to work, but every time he restored, he got blank files. After a week of struggling (he had to protect his ego :-), he gave up and asked one of the system gurus to do a restore on one of the institution’s systems. Guess what? Similar to zalodek’s story, it appeared that the backup software, while ticking over and indicating backup, was not backing up at all. And hadn’t been for months!Moral: no matter how and where you back up, periodically restore to make sure that it did actually backup.