A BACKUP PLAN

I have a web server where I manage 4 websites that we developed over the past 5 years. While performing my half yearly cleanup and maintenance yesterday, I accidentally knocked out the entire document root – That’s 5 years of effort vanishing with one click of a button! One of the websites was even something we built for an NGO!

As a data architect who is in the business of building & reviewing solutions for “Scalability” and “Fail-ability”, I had decided to take the more miserly route for my own personal work and did not invest in a fail-over strategy.

Thanks to my web-host, they had one of their 3 annual “random” backups done just a day ago. A thousand bucks and 4 sweaty hours under the AC later, all my websites were finally up.

Not the ideal weekend but learnt my lessons.

1. Build REDUNDANCY into your applications
2. NEVER use administrative rights. Always create a user with lesser privileges and use that for the day-to-day.
3. Invest in a BACKUP and archival mechanism.
4. It’s okay to fail. But learn from it.