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.