For the second time in a month, a prominent web service has become a cautionary tale on the perils of not having a backup and disaster recovery strategy. The first occurrence of this came at the beginning of the year – and marked the permanent demise of JournalSpace.Com. This time it’s Magnolia, the popular online bookmarking service. At present, the service is completely down and a message on the the site’s home page indicates uncertainty when it will return and how much of user’s data – if any – will be restored.
The details are sketchy at the moment, but given the extent and duration of the outage it’s clear Magnolia didn’t have any sort of disaster recovery strategy whatsoever – or, it seems, a reliable set of backups.
For site managers this must serve as a reminder that their highest priority must always be to preserve the integrity of the systems they manage when disaster strikes, as it inevitably will.
Remembering the following three simple rules will prevent you from ever having to be in the situation in which Magnolia now find itself:
- Maintain regular backups of system software and data
- Never trust just one backup. Always have several, with at least one being off-site. If all your backups are on-site, a fire, flood, or other disaster will take everything and it will be just as if you’d never backed up at all
- Don’t trust a backup procedure until you’ve verified that it actually works – and don’t forget to periodically test it. Nothing is more gut-wrenching than having a pile of backup media and finding out that none of it is readable
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