Backup your web site!

As the news of the avsim.com website hack and their extraordinary lack of backups ripples around the internet, I’m absolutely flabbergasted at how the owners of that site could think they didn’t need to have an offline backup.

According to the article their backup strategy was simply to make a daily copy onto a second server, a “hot” backup. So if anything happened they could simply switch to the secondary server and carry on while the primary server was repaired.
Nice plan. Except it doesn’t provide any protection against physical disaster, such as if the building catches fire or gets storm damaged. In these cases where both servers (being in the same room) can be damaged, you really need at least an offline backup consisting of a full copy of the site and any associated databases stored on removable media of some kind, be it DVD, external hard drive, or even USB microdrive.

I know only too well how important backups are after losing my forums database and finding (oh too late) that my then hosts backups weren’t nearly as useful as I had been lead to believe.
Fortunately some of my members where able to rally together and restored much of the lost posts through Googles cache, but it taught me a harsh lesson, never take backups for granted, since then my sites been hacked a second time but thanks to full backups, it was easily restored.

The site in the article has a temporary forums site running at the moment, and I was looking around it last night. As you would expect there’s a lot of questions being asked by the members, some of them placing the blame squarely on the shoulders of the owner for not having a reliable backup system in place.
I found it interesting that the admins where being quite defensive about it making comments such as “pointing fingers wont help us get the site back” which is a true enough statement, but completely missing the point that this site was in fact the biggest flight-sim site on the  net, it was 12 years old and had some 60,000 members, and apparently the owner had never stopped to consider what might happen if his house caught fire; Both the primary and backup server would be fried and 12 years worth of information and work provided by all those members would be gone. As it turns out that’s what happened anyway, but not through fire, through a hacker formatting both servers. And the situation is solely because the owner didn’t back up properly.

I think the members have every right to be VERY annoyed at the owner. When you have a group of people providing information and resources for your web site, you, as the owner, have an absolute obligation to ensure that all the work and information those members are giving you (free of charge in most cases) is protected to the best of your abilities.

In this case I would suggest that the owner has failed badly in his obligations to protect his members work and data; I would even go so far as to suggest that if in fact he really doesn’t know anythign about the most basic backup standards, he should probably hand over the reins to someone more site savvy.