Uncle Roger's Notebooks of Daily Life

Covering your backend

Do you back up your website? If you're like me and do all your development on a local machine before uploading it to your server, you might think you don't have to. You might also be wrong.

I can think of a number of reasons why what you have locally might not be the same as what you have online. The ones I came up with are:

• Server Logs
  If you're interested in preserving your server logs to see who's been accessing your website and why, you'll want to make backups of these on a regular basis. Of course, most ISP's purge these after a few days anyway, so if you care, you're probably already backing these up.
• Databases
  If you've got data stored in a database created by visitors to your website, this data is obviously generated online and does not exist locally. This certainly needs to be backed up, especially if you're dealing with orders and customer information. Again, however, if you have a database, you're already making backups, right?
• Configuration files
  If you ever edit any configuration files or CGI scripts on your server, than these changes are probably not reflected in the copy you have locally. You'll want a backup of these files too, so you don't have to recreate the work you did setting them up.
• Journal Comments
  If you have an online journal that has comments enabled, then you've got data that exists on your server and not on your local machine. Keep in mind, too, that if you post your entries via a web-based form or via e-mail, you may not have local copies of your own postings.
• Discussion forums
  If your website has a discussion forum or "Bulletin Board System" (as they were called in my day), then all of that discussion and information is only there on your server. Note that these postings may actually be stored in a database rather than in distinct files. Either way, it's probably something of which you want to have a copy.

Now, if you're paying a hosting company, presumably part of what you're paying for is professional-level services, including regular, full backups. Unfortunately, a hard drive crash is not the only way to lose your data.

That's all fine and dandy, but what if your ISP goes *poof!* and disappears on you? It happened to me once before, so you'd think I would have learned. Unfortunately, it seems I haven't.

For the second time, my websites went kablooey! along with my host. For a goodly portion of the day, yesterday, I thought for sure everything was gone. Of course, I had nothing backed up locally. You'd think I'd learn.

Well, luckily the problem simply that my ISP's upstream provider went dark on them, and when they called their secondary to switch things over, someone screwed something up somewhere and they went away, taking me (and a lot of others) with them.

After a few hours, though, all is well, once again. I've learned my lesson this time! I'm going to back things up for sure! Real Soon Now, that is...

Related Links What happened to MassLinux? Pegasus Web Technologies

[ Posted: 20:00 | home | print ]

You could always do what I do...

Which is to host your website on a server you've built out of your house. It costs a bit more (depending on how you do it) but I am in complete control. At least in as much as I'm in control of anything. After that I just back up to CD when convenient; I still have to establish better incremental backup systems. I *know* you have extra computers around (ATARI!) and that you know how to use some open source OSes/webservers, so the only real problem might be either a static IP or dynamic DNS service...

Posted by dugh

The way I work it is like this... My host is a Linux host. My home computer set up consists of (currently) three machines. One Linux server. One Windows/2k server. One Dell 1.8ghz workstation, dual boots Linux and Win/2k. When I'm working on the website, I'm working in Linux, locally on the code, then hitting a mirror database and near-mirror web site on my linux box. Once it's doing what I expect it to do, I think publish the files to the host (I'm a DreamHost.com customer). My local machine is backed up via scripts (and a service on the Windows side) to the appropriate server in the basement. Excluding viruses and such, it's a pretty robust set up. Dreamhost and all three of my home boxes (soon to be four) would have to completely die at the same time for me to lose everything. My house would have to burn down to lose everything at home, and even then I have DVDs in my car or in my brief case with periodic backups. It's not perfect, but it works. Also, being in the tech industry, I'm fairly anal about doing maintenance on the machines, replacing parts as soon as I'm aware of problems, cleaning/updating/reloading as necessary. I'm happy to say that, excluding when I moved back in August and the occasional power failure at my hold house, my Windows server has been up 24/7 for > 3 years now. Not bad.

Posted by chornbe

Time is of the essence

Sure, setting up a linux server would be neat (I've done it before) and I already have a static IP coming into the house, but the big problem is that I simply don't have the time to learn the ins an outs of apache and dig into linux more and learn enough about security and... It's just not an option these days. (Heck, I'm lucky if I get into my home office 3 times a week even to deal with photos or check messages!) There are also lesser issues like the relatively slow DSL upload speeds, noise factors, etc. I do periodic backups of everything I have locally (which, really, is just about everything other than comments), but in the future (near future, I hope) I'm hoping to have more online updates going on (www.happypoopyboy.com, www.portablespast.com, etc.). It's not really a serious issue for me (I don't have lots of customer data online or anything) but it's still something to keep in mind. I'm thinking that if I make a tar of everything, I could download that weekly (ideally, set up a script to logon, tar it all up, and download it automatically) and then burn it to CD. One of these days...

Posted by Uncle Roger