The other day, I ran across this article in The Sun entitled Bay-grass research lost in fire. In this article, there is a valuable lesson about the need to keep your backup data off-site.
The 25-foot-by-40-foot trailers, meant to be temporary offices and to house computer equipment, had become fixtures since they were installed in the mid-1980s, said laboratory director Michael Roman. With data and backup servers stored in one of the buildings, the researchers never imagined a fire would destroy both trailers, which sat about 10 feet apart. (Emphasis added.)
The University of Maryland Center for Environmental and Estuarine Study essentially had a backup strategy that had backup data–presumably the backup device and media–just a short walk away. From the description, it sounds like the backup media was not even stored in a fireproof safe. So, a fire or other similar catastrophe would have had the same results here. The file server and the backup data would be destroyed.
The lesson here is also a lesson I learned when my house was broken into. When you least expect it, you need a backup plan. In my case, I was lucky since most of my data is easily rebuilt from places I maintain it online. There was still some information that was irreplaceable–mainly, old electronic documents from my days as an undergraduate and graduate student are now lost forever, with the only copies I have being the hard copies I printed out and kept.
The lesson here is that no matter how big or small your data, making a backup and storing it in a different and secure physical location is key. One of the reasons I am trying to get Rsync to work at home is so that I know my data is backed up off-site on a regular basis. Even if your off-site strategy is to put data on an external hard drive, make sure to keep that hard drive in a safe place. You may never need to use it, but it will be extremely handy the one time you do.
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My colleagues and I have just instituted an rsync-based backup for our servers. Its a standalone unit that sits in the colo space. A nearly identical server sits at one of our homes some 30 miles away and syncs the differences several times daily. You have protect yourself against all elements; power, disk failures, environmental, at all locations.
I am a BIG fan of using rsync for backing up data. I actually rsync my ~/Documents [my most critical files] both to my colo’ed server and my home file server.
Two things keep me from rsyncing more to my co-lo server. 1) disk space and 2) bandwidth charges.
Oh and people at University of Maryland Center for Environmental and Estuarine Study are idiots! Come on you didn’t thing a fire could jump 10 feet from one trailer to another?
Alex: Right on. I keep looking at it, but I might mix it with the usage of some online services, e.g., Flickr.
Paul: Someone seriously screwed the pooch on that one. Even the backup tapes being stored off-site would have afforded some protection. Even then, I doubt they actually had a working backup. Something tells me that the backup media was probably not in good shape if this was their “backup strategy.”
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