Backup Your Files Now Before It’s Too Late!

Backup Your Files Today

I read today an interesting article about a company called JournalSpace which offers a Free Blog Hosting Service and because of an unbelievable simple mistake or let’s say “Misunderstanding of a Program’s Function By a Mad Employee” lead for losing almost all of the blogger’s pages which goes back to 6 years ago!

According to JournalSpace official report, the manager said:

“It was the guy handling the IT (and, yes, the same guy who I caught stealing from the company, and who did a slash-and-burn on some servers on his way out) who made the choice to rely on RAID as the only backup mechanism for the SQL server. He had set up automated backups for the HTTP server which contains the PHP code, but, insecurely, had no backup system in place for the SQL data. The ironic thing here is that one of his hobbies was telling everybody how smart he was.”

Unbelievable!

It seems that the IT guy of JournalSpace thought that having a “Mirrored Copy” of the database which is stored on a secondary hard drive will always help in restoring the “corrupted database” found on the basic hard drive.

What is Data Mirroring?

Mirroring is a having a duplicate content saved on another drive so both drives stores the exact information, therefore, if the primary location fails, the content can be served and loaded from the secondary location, on autopilot.

..But with disregard to the integrity of information 😉

So if the content is corrupted on the primary drive, it’s corrupted on the 2nd one.. because it’s just an image!

So what is Backup?

Backup is different, backup is the process of retaining several copies of the information on a secondary hard drive, so in case the primary disk fails or the information becomes corrupt, you will have the ability to restore your files from the most recent copy which you find fine.

So let’s say that you woke up some day and found that all of your files on your hard disk have been infected with a Virus that you can’t remove, and all of the MS. Word documents you were creating since ages could not be repaired, what would you do?

You would check the latest copies of your file backups and to restore from the most recent and yet most perfect copy, right?

Now what happened with JournalSpace seems that the smart guy NEVER performed a regular backup of their data, and he thought that the Mirroring Process was enough.. A simple misunderstanding of the software function lead to great damages!

They were forced to SELL out the company because of that mistake! The good news is the new owner made sure to perform a regular data backup 🙂

What Should You Do Now?

I personally use an awesome Backup Program for my home office computer called Acronis True Image Home.

I highly recommend downloading a trail copy of that File Backup Software and to test it out, believe me, it saved my life couple a times.. and you don’t want to lose yours 😉

Backup!