Over the last few days, you may have read about a server’s complete data loss that resulted in the demise of blog hosting provider company.
In their assessment of the disaster, company found they had been replicating data to a second hard drive in their server via RAID to provide both backup and disaster recovery abilities. The data disaster occurred when the data on the first drive disappeared: this condition was immediately replicated to the second drive, resulting in total data loss. In turn, company users lost all their blog entries, ultimately leading to company’s decision to close its doors for good.
Now, it’s very easy to point the finger and say that these guys should have had a better backup strategy in place, but I’ll leave that to the experts … I’m more interested in using this as a proof point for the many hosting customers I know who are in the same position or worse – considering the fact that many don’t have even a second hard drive. If you are in this category, please use this as a cautionary tale, and let it remind you that you need a proper backup solution to protect your business.
A common misconception is that “real” backup solutions are prohibitively expensive. While the costs of storage solutions were relatively high in the past, prices have come down dramatically in recent years, which makes backup products correspondingly cheaper. Today you can have your data backed up – off your server – starting at just $5 a month.
It takes just one of these potential data-loss instances to make years of investing in a backup solution worthwhile.
Naturally, my preference would be that you buy a backup solution. I would prefer that you buy a backup solution from anywhere rather than stay unprotected … after all, the survival of your business could depend on how you decide to back up your server.