Backups are important

As you may guess, this blog is hosted somewhere. I do occasional backups, but usually I do backup quite rare. Usually once per few months unless I deploy some changes. There are few reasons why it happens. Firstly, I wasn’t sure that I will do blogging, secondly, I kind of forget. I believed that I deployed my blog and hosting company will make sure that data is still there, and I totally forgot about it. I did backup in kind of habit but because I was busy it happens rarely.

And few days ago, hosting company became victim of ransomware. All files were encrypted. Moreover, because some critical OS files were also encrypted, I don’t even able to see name of the files to see what I was writing about. Unfortunately, Google does not like many of my posts, so I was able to recover only about 50% of them from Google cache. Not bad, but it is not good either.

Anyway, hosting company did right thing and decided to pay ransom and then started to decrypt user data. After long 94 hours my data is back. Communication was not really good at the beginning, but CEO stepped in at certain stage and then it became smoother. After 2 days I was able to see files, even they still stayed encrypted. And about 2 days later, my site is back to normal.

After I knew about fact that files are encrypted, I did realize that I don’t have data there were good chance that I will be lost it. Ransom could be too much money for company, or they still will pay but there is no guarantee that files could be decrypted. I did backup more than 2 months ago. I have several blogs and I would lose about 20 posts. Most of them took a lot of time to think and write. Not a big deal but still painful. It will take quite some time to restore and I will be thinking that I’m wasting my time by typing the same things again. Anyway, I can survive it one way or another.

But many people have backups of their data and databases, but they decided to store them on the same server. As result they thought, that they lost data and backups. And you will be surprised how many people did it. Some people run even commercial sites and latest backup that they have access to was 2 years old. And you can imagine their frustration. Few people got fired, few people lost clients.

Why am I writing it? Well, to remind everyone of you, that backups are important. Think about every data you have and imagine you lost it. Then evaluate, how much will it cost for you to recover data or repair damage. Everybody is laze and don’t want to do extra work, but you have valuable data, you have to have backup. And backup should be at least in 3 different places far away from each other. And under far I assume 300 miles or 500 kilometers. Some people can say, well if something big is happens like earthquake I will have bigger problems to worry than my family photos. Yes, it is true, but why add to pain of loosing house pain of lost memories from your family photos. It doesn’t require much work to save them.

Do backups, make sure you can restore your backup on another computer without access to anything. I knew few guys that encrypted backups but stored password on their computer. Computer died and password lost. Try to recover you backup. For example, if this is web site, try to get free hosting somewhere and try to deploy your site there. You will immediately find out that you missed something. Very often it is database. Sometimes you forgot, how you configured something. Try to do it but document this time. Trust me, it will be much worse, when you trying to do when your boss is staying behind you and saying that he is losing money every minute. It is a lot of stress and people tend to do mistakes under stress conditions. Big painful mistakes.

And by doing this this exercise, you will know how long it will take to deploy you web site somewhere else and later it will help you to make decisions. Imagine, your hosting company will say it will take 1 hour to fix it and for you to deploy it somewhere will take 2 hours. Sure, it is better to wait for fix. But probably after 3 hours, you should start deploying it on new location.
And remember, you have to repeat it every few months as your website will evolve, more components will be added to it.

Think about data. Which data is most important, when it is best time to do backup, how often you have to do it? Thru the day, think how bad it will be if your site got deleted right now. Do you feel comfortable with it? How about your clients? Perhaps you have to back data up more often.

I hope it will help someone and will inspire to think about backup.