Always check your backups!

[Red Squirrel]

So I've been working on a full blown linux based control panel that will basically be for hosting and general home based server management.

I noticed I made a mistake where when I created the root user, I set the home directory to / even though the real home directory is /root. My system will delete a home directory when the user is deleted. If I had happened to delete root as part of a test or w/e it would have deleted the entire server including any mapped directories and their contents.

This reminded me to double check my backups, and I noticed that the last backup was in December! I just checked and I must of moved the script on my main server at one point and forgot to change it in the crontab.

Fixed it now, and forced the job to run. Fewww, this could of been real ugly!

 

[effowe]

Well Done. I actually just started making backups today! I had been putting it off for a long while, but finally set up Acronis on 2 PC's to backup to a NAS over FTP. I really wanted to use Win 7's backup and restore, but since I'm on Home Pro, they don't allow a network backup. That is a load of crap.

 

[lokiju]

I manage backups as part of my (sys admin) job and have to be audited for SOX compliance, that shit is brutal but I've done it so much I can do it in my sleep now.

Needless to say I fully appreciate how important backups are.

 

[Ns1]

Funny, I had a similar accident last week. Needed to restore from backup, it was 2 weeks old. Was wondering WTF was going on, the HD ran out of space.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Funny, I had a similar accident last week. Needed to restore from backup, it was 2 weeks old. Was wondering WTF was going on, the HD ran out of space.

Doh!

My external backup solution has that issue, it uses IDE drives that are only like 300-500GB so every now and then I'll have one run out of space then I have to delete stuff that's less important. This solution is kinda ment as an offsite solution to my existing backups, but I don't really have anywhere offsite to put the drives. Still good to have though as if my entire server/raid fails then at least I have those backups too.

At work we had a similar issue with our old backup solution. The tapes were too small, and we were using Tivoli which nobody was trained in so we had no clue what we were doing, and basically the scratch tape volume (think that's what they called it) was full and we did not know what to do. Months and months without backups was scary... glad we have some now. Backupexec is actually a pretty decent program for commercial use tbh.