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Hacker Destroys Avsim.com, Along With Its Backups
el americano writes "Flight Simulator community website Avsim has experienced a total data loss after both of their online servers were hacked. The site's founder, Tom Allensworth, explained why 13 years of community developed terrains, skins, and mods will not be restored from backups: 'Some have asked whether or not we had back ups. Yes, we dutifully backed up our servers every day. Unfortunately, we backed up the servers between our two servers. The hacker took out both servers, destroying our ability to use one or the other back up to remedy the situation.'"
To any sysadmins and DBAs...
Make sure you have offsite backups
"Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff ;)"
on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it
Linus Torvalds Jul 20 1996, 3:00 am
And for those who don't like to pay $10000 for backup software, there's Bacula. Couple that with an LTO-4 drive (~1000) and LTO-4 tapes (800GB uncompressed, ~60/piece) and you're set. Rsync.net is a decent, cheap online provider for those gaps when you haven't rotated tapes.
Bacula is pretty sweet because it lets you backup to disk volumes and then you can schedule a roll to tape. So you can just back everything up incrementally to a disk volume and then copy those backups to tape, and then run rsync on the disk volumes to have an offsite, online backup. When recovering, you ask to recover from whatever's available. If you keep enough disk storage around (and there's really no reason not to) you can recover to any date in the past. In the event of a disaster your tapes come into play.
Now with drives so cheap the temptation is to buy a external hard drive and use that. But tapes have a long history, guaranteed backwards compatibility (planned anyway, LTO drives have to R/W the previous generation and Read 2 generations back), last longer than moving drives, are simpler, lighter, more robust and more portable. Not that I wouldn't keep a external around to dump desktops but tape is the DR standard.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
The admins' claim that they were backed up is nothing short of an outright lie. A dependency on rsync or any other mirroring technique alone is just plain negligent, when both servers are exposed to the world at large. As a bad analogy, it's like allowing someone to light two fuses with the same match.
The only way to do backups properly is to have a complete set, offline, in a separate location.
Sheesh. When will people learn?
The [a href="http://16systems.com/zero.php"]Great Zero Challenge[/url] says otherwise. They're simply asking for the filename of one of the files on a drive that has been wiped once with zeros. Despite offering the challenge for over a year and actively speaking to data recovery companies, no one has taken them up on the offer.
Bleh!
So they had no real backup strategy....but what happened to them REALLY REALLY sucks. It really irks me seeing so many comments saying these "retards" had it coming to them.
Listen folks....we're talking about a couple of guys who spent their free time creating a website. They're not making any real money out of this (in fact, they all have regular day jobs).
They've been advertising for a Tech Manager (non-paid) for quite a quite so time now. They did get one recently...but it turns out the guy harvested the emails from the systems and sent out a bunch of spam. He has since been fired.Even though the avsim folks aren't saying it was him who hacked and destroyed their site, it's quite hard not to think it was him.
It's been quite a blow to the flightsim community and I have noticed a lot of IT folks are offering help.....I just haven't seen a single one on this thread.
Tedious and expensive, but several people made a good living out of doing it (one guy I knew did it as a hobby and made over UKP100K one year.) However, as bits get smaller, servos get more accurate, and tracks get denser, the modus operandi just ceases to exist any more.
Mind you, for security reasons I always dismantle old drives and bend the disks in half using a lump hammer. That, and the fact that hard drive magnets are just incredibly useful if you have a steel hulled boat and want convenient attachments for e.g. cable ties. They are powerful and very short range, and usually nickel plated. To buy a pair of equally useful magnets from hardware stores costs nearly as much as a drive.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."