Slashdot Mirror
Why Mirroring Is Not a Backup Solution
Craig writes "Journalspace.com has fallen and can't get up. The post on their site describes how their entire database was overwritten through either some inconceivable OS or application bug, or more likely a malicious act. Regardless of how the data was lost, their undoing appears to have been that they treated drive mirroring as a backup and have now paid the ultimate price for not having point-in-time backups of the data that was their business." The site had been in business since 2002 and had an Alexa page rank of 106,881. Quantcast said they had 14,000 monthly visitors recently. No word on how many thousands of bloggers' entire output has evaporated.
That is one reason why mirroring isn't a backup, and why backups should ideally be off-line.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
The rules of backups:
1. Backup all your data
2. Backup frequently
3. Take some backups off-site
4. Keep some old backups
5. Test your backups
6. Secure your backups
7. Perform integrity checking
They also purposely blocked archive.org via a robots.txt exclusion, so the bloggers can't use that to try and recover some of their blogs.
Looks like at least some content is still in Google's cache, those looking to salvage their journals should act quickly.
You can limit google's search results to a particular site by using the "site:domainname.com" search term (example) and then click the "Cached" links of each result to see Google's copy.
There's also a Greasemonkey script for Firefox that can automatically add Google Cache links next to page links, so you can navigate from one cached page to another easier.
DR is Disaster Recovery
HA is High Availability