Joel Spolsky: Stop Making Backups

Translation of a small note by Joel Spolsky " Let's Stop Talking About Backups ". Joel is one of the creators of stackoverflow.com and the host of the blog joelonsoftware.com .

Do you back up data from your working machine?

And from production servers?
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Do you keep backups on the same disk, or transfer them to another machine?

Do you transfer server backups to another data center?

All this is a standard set of questions for checking the qualifications of the system administrator.

Nevertheless, I suggest for a moment to get away from the idea of ​​creating backup copies. Just doing them is not enough. Any administrator has a well thought out and customized backup system. Problems begin when the backup you need to restore.

Indeed, in this case, it turns out that:

• You encrypted backups with a symmetric key, and the only copy of this key was stored on the drive that burned
• You backed up only the contents of your ASP.NET websites, and ignored the huge IIS metabase
• The daily dump of your database was made on a FAT partition, where it was automatically truncated to 2 GB without an error message.
• Your hoster automatically backed up data from all servers to the tape, but it was your tape that was lost in the warehouse, and its search took three days
• as well as many other equally interesting stories that completely negate the fact that you made backups.

Just making backups is not enough. You need to be sure that you can restore them if necessary.

If we are talking about websites, then by restoring the backup, I understand the following: you should be able to quickly restore a fairly fresh copy of your site with all the contents on an absolutely clean machine without having to access the original server (because all the data on it can be lost ).

And if you can restore your site in such conditions - then you are doing the right backups.

So stop just doing backups. Start to restore them.