trigatch4

Hey guys... last week my web server crashed, the hard drive failed and backups were corrupted. I lost everything I've done on every website since I made Internet Marketing my Full-Time job.

I want to remind everyone to put their own backup systems in place... don't put it off... you WILL regret it. Posted my story to my blog and hope you can learn from my mistakes instead of your own.

My forums now appear dead and if anyone is interested in college basketball, politics or cooking I would be elated for you to come hang out at Bracketball - Powered by vBulletin, Political Fury - Political News & Discussion - Powered by vBulletin or ChefClub.net - Cooking & Recipe Community.

For anyone else dealing with tough times: take a breath of fresh air, a short break, keep your head up and get back to kicking ass... things could always be worse.

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ChrisS

Holy shit...Did you have any other backups?

What are you going to do now?

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kamesh

sounds really bad. I thought things were sorted out since its been almost two weeks back that you have told me abt your server crash.

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abednego

I've had a similar issue in the past. Never thought I would ever have to backup until then. It's worth it if you're in it for the long run. Also, many hosting companies provide backup services for no additional charge. Even on dedicated servers. Good luck man.

gopher

Damn man, sorry to hear that. I had something similar happen to me in March of last year, my hard drive just died and they couldn't recover it. All of my local AM work was lost, fortunately not the parts that I kept online. Ever since I've been dumping my complete hard drive with SuperDuper! and I also recently started doing hourly backups with time machine to another external hard drive. Backing it up online will have to wait until I move to my new place and get proper Internet ..

But I didn't really think about backing up my online data, will definitely have to put something in place, something happening to that would cripple my business. So thanks for reminding me.

leihen

sounds bad.anybody have good idea?

seocracy

esp. after all those great promo movies.

that sucks big time bud

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tombo100

I had the same thing happen to me with a community of 5,000. I even flew down to Miami to the hosting office to get the hard drive and try to restore it myself. No luck and it was not worth paying a service to restore it all.

Keep your chin up and I hope you are feeling better.

Jon

This is why people in our industry smoke so many damn cigarettes!!! Now do you understand... Mom??

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adamx12m

HD failures just plain suck. I lost a drive last month and even though I had backups going but for some reason they weren't fully working as I thought. Even though I didn't lose everything even a day's worth of data loss is a huge waste of time considering how cheap storage is vs. your time. Everything from now on is raid 5 or backed up some how. I don't trust dvd's and now i'm back to looking at DLT tapes.

Another tip, even if you have backups you should really try once in a while restoring the data just to make sure they really work and how to do it. If it's really critical you should have multiple copies as a strategy. Good luck going forward...

IronLogik

sorry to hear about the data loss - that's my nightmare. a little late now, but maybe useful still (for people with linux servers):

Backups using rsync
Easy Automated Snapshot-Style Backups with Rsync

mike82

Always keep multiple backups too, in case there is an error with one of them.

jelf

I second this. Cant believe how many times fucking host said well this one isnt any good..and this one neither. blah

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cocoluv

I know exactly how you feel.

Many years ago while I was writing my thesis for my Masters Degree....hmmm, think B.G. (before Google)....I lost my entire thesis on my hard drive a month out from handing it in. Needless to say, you can you suck in some deep breaths and start again which I did. Plenty of good coffee and some sleepless nights. Just like you said trigatch4

ScottDaMan

Never trust your data to another company or hardware component. You really need to take matters into your own hand.

rsync sounds cool, I'll check that out in a minute. Your Eureka post really went into greater detail with the play by play.

Anyway, go look into mysqldump. Most linux servers have that, especially if you have cpanel. Anyway, for the future, setup a cronjob on EVERY site that has databases and have it run mysqldump to a backup folder OUTSIDE of your /public_html folder.

I have mine running daily on sites that have content changing daily. Other sites have it running weeky.

Hell, I even have a cronjob that makes a tarball of my site once a week. I login and download weekly. I store these on my local hard disk and my Seagate external drive (FreeAgent).

mysqldump method for DB backups:
Would make a file: DBNAME.20080203.sql (today's date)

tarball backup of site files (not DBs)
Would make a file: SITEABREV-020308.tar
Contents would be all files under your /public_html/

Just remember to login once a week and download. Or else, you'll start using some serious disk space.

If you have shell, login under shell and run these commands first to make sure there's no errors.

I hope this helps. You guys have helped me a lot, I'm always happy to help where I can.

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trigatch4

Thanks for everyone's consolations, well wishes and advice.

ScottDaMan: Those scripts look like they backup one site at a time since it is asking for DB name and password. What if you have 100 wordpress sites all with their own DB?

I'll definitely talk this over with my host and see if they can help me put this into action... thanks dude.

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nis

You can use mysqldump to dump all databases:

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BrooklynBlue

trigatch,

Daily automated full backups of your web content and databases is definitely worth the effort to get going, as you've learned. I think it takes a harsh lesson to fully realize the value in it. (luckily for me, it was an employer's data rather than my own!)

Anyway, you can backup all databases mysqldump via the --all-databases option. Just make sure you login as the mysql root user so that you have read access to every database. Also, pipe your mysqldump results through gzip to save disk space. Usually can compress at least 70%.

As you scale up across multiple servers or are unable to login and manually retrieve your backups off of your production server for a length of time, having automated rsync and mysql replication to another server (from another provider) is well worth the effort. Also consider implementing backup rotations -- e.g. 1 week of dailys, 2 months of weeklies, 1 year of monthlies, or whatever makes sense for you.

ScottDaMan

Yep, if you have that many on a server, use the alldb options. It helps.

Brooklyn, once you have your DBs backed up via all databases option, how do you pipe it through gzip? I might want to do that.

Thanks

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BrooklynBlue

This would work:

If you're tables are all MyISAM and you have a shit-ton of data, checkout using mysqlhotcopy.

Priority_Mail90

If you have something a little more complex running, these guys did a really good tutorial and discussion on potential issues.

How to: Move / Copy a live MySQL database (and what not to do) - Programming - SoftwareProjects

bramzero

thats why i use RAID configuration for harddrives in most of my servers. and remote backup.

gdubs12345

thats fucked up, i was always worried something like that would happen to me. Ive been trying to make backups every few months. I think ill make one right now.

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emp

Ha! Backups are for weak cowards... (slinks away to copy some files)

::emp::

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