Coding Horror Knocked Down: A Tale of Back-ups

Some time today an issue at Coding Horror‘s web host took the site down. It appears it might have been due to the loss of the database, and it also appears that while the hosting company said they were making data back-ups, in fact they weren’t. That’s brutal.

I feel for Jeff Atwood et al. in that, if only because I know from experience how much that sucks. When we were first launching DreamBank an issue at our host took out our entire production database as well. Heroic recovery efforts on the part of one of our developers recovered the lost data, with absolutely no help from the web host.

We promptly switched hosts because, in our instance, it was a case of professional negligence and stupidity rather than just run-of-the-mill incompetence, but that’s not the take-away from these events. That kind of thing can happen anywhere, for a thousand different reasons.

The take-away is this: we only own the data that we physically have possession of. Whether it’s back-ups of your website’s source, your database tables, or all the information you’re storing out there on “the cloud” in Google docs and Gmail, if you don’t have a current copy of it you don’t really own it. You’re just renting on someone else’s good graces.

We at DreamBank learned that the hard way. Jeff’s learning that the hard way today. Ma.gnolia learned that the hard way too (though it’s probably more accurate to say we all re-learned it). But maybe you don’t have to. Learn from our mistakes . Back up your data yourself, today.

And on that note I’m going to go back up my laptop, which hasn’t been backed up in three days, and dump the database powering this blog.