A sobering tale from the operator of social bookmarking site ma.gnolia which lost half its users bookmarks through not having a decent backup. Interestingly they were running off 2 Xserves and 4 Mac minis.
- They had RAID (but of course that doesn’t protect you from data corruption, as both copies get corrupted).
- They did a FireWire backup (but of course that just backs up your corrupt database).
Hint: mysqldump is your friend.
Video interview on the Ma.gnolia site, with a transcript here.
Meanwhile TidBITs have declared Friday 13th as “Verify your backups day”. And remind us of the Tao of Backup.
Remember, sometimes the cloud blows away.
Although mysqldump is your friend, “Backup & Recovery” is your _best_ friend 🙂
http://www.amazon.com/Backup-Recovery-Inexpensive-Solutions-Systems/dp/0596102461/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1235345577&sr=1-1
YMMV, but I think it’s generally regarded as the “Backup Bible”. Seems that the Ma.gnolia folk didn’t ever read it tho’…