I have written some articles about how to do backups, and I realize how important backup is. When things are working normally you won’t need the backup. But when something goes wrong, you will need your data badly, and without it the business will stop. What happened yesterday was a wake-up call that hit me very hard on how important backup is.
Yesterday our gateway server — it was running Ubuntu Desktop 11.04 with DHCP, DNS, Squid Cache, and a router installed — the hard drive suddenly stopped working. It slowed down and then stopped. I tried to recover the hard drive, but it was too late. Of all the data in our office, I had never backed up this server.
So after realizing the hard drive was broken, the first thing I did was get the internet back online. It took me 2 hours to configure another server (the development server) to act as the gateway server (without Squid cache, just DHCP and DNS). It took me another 2 hours to try fixing the broken hard drive before I finally gave up. And it took me 5 hours to get the new hard drive, fresh-install Ubuntu server, and configure it so it worked like the previous one. Total hours spent: 9 hours — basically one full working day. All of this because I didn’t back up that server.
After that experience, I’m sharing it on this blog, hoping you won’t have to learn it the hard way as I did. Everything is back to normal now and I’ve already backed up the working installation to an image using CloneZilla.
Backup regularly, backup often!