Wednesday, January 18, 2006
Backing Up Your Website
FedEx just dropped off 2 packages today. (5) 250gig drives from NewEgg and the Infrant ReadyNAS X6. Now I have 750gigs of storage on a RAID5 setup with a spare HD (too bad it's not a hot spare).
Hats off to the guys at Infrant. Their product rocks! Put in the drives and the RAID array builds itself and I was up and running in less than 1 hour. Their web-based management console is easy to use. I am using it to backup PixPulse via rsync. I do daily incrementals at 4 hour intervals and weekly full backups which are all automated. This backs up the codebase, database and filesystem. PixPulse is also backed up offsite to another server as an added failover precaution.
For anyone running a web service on a single server, please please please backup your files. This doesn't have to be on a RAID 5 system, but hard drives do fail and that's millions of dollars of equity that you lost which will be very hard to build back. I actually know a few consumer startups that have 20 - 100k users and don't backup anything--at minimum backup your database.
