EVERYONE!

What would you do if all your data was suddenly gone? I know many people would have a nervous breakdown including me. Over the weekend a hacker was able to exploit a UK web host’s servers and erase as many as 100,000 websites’ data. Many of those customers had no backup solution in place and thus may never have the ability to recover their data due to the finality of UNIX’s “rm -rf” command.

Some 50 percent of Vaserv’s customers signed up for unmanaged service, which doesn’t include data backup, Foster said. It remains unclear of those website owners will ever be able to retrieve their lost data, he said. As a result, at least half the websites that were hosted on the site remain offline.

Which leads me to ask, “what kind of backup solutions are in place for both your computers and your web servers (if you have any)?”

Personally, I have a two-tiered backup solution for all my computers.

1. All my Macs have time machine enabled and back up to an external drive. This is a local backup solution and would be the fastest to recover data if something was lost. Time machine makes it very easy to “undelete” something that was accidentally removed from the system. However, if my house burned down, my data would most likely be unrecoverable.
2. I use an online backup solution. My service of choice is Mozy, which offers unlimited backup storage space for about $5 a month per computer. They also have a free 2gb backup solution. Mozy works with both Mac and PC. This is a secondary backup solution for me and is my “safety net” in case anything were to happen to my local backups.

My web server is another matter. Like the folks in the article above, my web host doesn’t back up my data. So I’ve set up an automated process whereby all my databases are compressed and emailed to me every night. Periodically I’ll go through and delete the really old ones to conserve space on my Gmail account. This doesn’t include the filesystem. I know that this isn’t ideal and I really should upgrade my account to include automated backups.

How do you ensure that your data isn’t lost? Do you even have a backup strategy? Tell me in the comments below!