Backup is for Wimps

I always tell my clients to do a backup. Of course, none of them do. Until that day when their hard drive fails. It's not a question of if it fails, I tell them, but when. Usually it only takes that one staggering, painful experience to scar them into becoming Backup Believers. Usually.

Today one of the hard drives in my Linux server, which hosts this site, failed on me. It was the main root filesystem drive. It had been spinning nearly non-stop for over four years. That's decent, I think. The other drive that I bought at the same time is still going strong (at least, it is as of this minute).

Fortunately, I had a backup system in place, with redundant hard drives in the machine. I don't use a RAID (which I probably should), but instead rely on regular rsync backups from the main drives to a couple backup drives. I think I have 5 hard drives in that machine (yes, it gets warm).

Once I discovered the failed drive, I was back up in an hour. It should have taken less time, but I had never practiced the restore before, and there was a little trouble booting from the mirror. But I prevailed. Up and at 'em again. What a relief. Not what I expected to be doing today. What I expected to be doing was digging post holes in my backyard. Hard to say which I ended up preferring...

File under general Fri Jun 3 19:42:43 CT 2005