dreadedmonkeygod . net

Two excellent blog entries popped up in my reader this morning, both on a subject that's near and dear to my heart: backups.

First comes the tale of Jeff Atwood, who reminds us that nobody is responsible for securing your data but you.

Then I belatedly realized that this was, after all, my data. And it is irresponsible of me to leave the fate of my data entirely in someone else's hands, regardless of how reliable they may or may not be. Responsibility for my data begins with me. If I haven't taken appropriate measures, who am I to cast aspersions on others for not doing the same? Glass houses and all that.

And Joel Spolsky reminds us that no untested system can be relied upon:

But let's stop talking about "backups." Doing a backup is too low a bar. Any experienced system administrator will tell you that they have a great backup plan, the trouble comes when you have to restore.

And that's when you discover that:

• The backed-up files were encrypted with a cryptographically-secure key, the only copy of which was on the machine that was lost
• The server had enormous amounts of configuration information stored in the IIS metabase which wasn't backed up
• The backup files were being copied to a FAT partition and were silently being truncated to 2GB
• Your backups were on an LTO drive which was lost with the data center, and you can't get another LTO drive for three days
• And a million other things that can go wrong even when you "have" "backups."

The minimum bar for a reliable service is not that you have done a backup, but that you have done a restore.

So, I'll be making a backup of all my stuff tonight. You should do the same. The holidays are crazy.

If you don't have a backup system, stop whatever you're doing right now and go read JWZ's quick writeup my quick writeup on how to do it. His system is awesome: if the hard drive in his computer fails, he just connects the backup drive and reboots. Just a few minutes of time lost (not counting the lost work).

Update: Fred is absolutely right in the comments below that Jamie Zawinski's (AKA JWZ) writeup probably isn't the best resource to link to here. So I've done my own very fast writeup on how I back up my own files, and posted it here.