Lessons in backups
OK, so I’ve re-learned the importance of not only backing up, but verifying backups. The other day, I decided to upgrade my blog software to CommunityServer 2.0. I apparently messed something up and before you know it, I had deleted my CS 2.0 database. While I had backups from a week ago (sufficient to restore back to my last blog post for sure), I had never verified the backups. Let’s just say the time to test your backups is not after a failure in which you need to use them.
Luckily, I had a backup device that most people don’t think of when they consider their options — Google Cache. I was able to easily use google cache to reassemble my blog posts as well as the comments. If some of you have noticed that my blog has been posting a large amount of posts in the past few days, its because I had to repost everything on my blog. Its a big pain in the butt and now I have to do some work to update google with my new articles, but at least I could recover it. Now before any Microsofties yell at me, I did try to use MSN Search cache first, but wasn’t able to find everything — one again proving that Google still has the edge in this market.
Suffice to say that this should be a lesson to all of you, and should serve as a refresher course for myself, that simply doing a backup isn’t sufficient — verification of that backup is essential to a good disaster recovery plan.
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