Happy Birthday Old Friend

No other purpose for this post, other than to tell an old friend happy birthday!  So gunner:

Happy “29th” Birthday my friend!  Where would I be now, had you not suckered me in and took me beneath your wing.  I will always appreciate the guidance and friendship you have always given me.  Best wishes to you and your family.

I lift my glass to you “big brother”  and wish you a very happy birthday now and always.

Cheers!

Importance Of Backups

My goodness its been a while since I last had time to sit down at my keyboard and pen some thoughts.  To anyone who has wasted time in checking back, sorry. 

Things have been extremely busy the last couple of months, as my real company has been going through a small face change and relocation.  Nothing major, just expanding our horizons.  However we learned today something that DMOZ learned a while back, and it is a hard lesson to learn.

We have been down for almost a week, transitioning to our new location.  Our last business day was this past Saturday.  We fired up our server for the first time since Sunday morning and predictably it imploded.     “No big deal” says our IT guy, we just swap out our server machine with a new temporary one, restore from one of his two Saturday automatic (redundant) backups and we build out a new server to copy new transactions on too.   Smooth, quick and painless…..

Fast forward two hours later….  Well wouldn’t you know it, his two automatic, redundant backups failed on each day Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, none of which through the normal error flags alerting anyone to failed backups.  Fortunately for him, I am a paranoid freak about our data.   My last work day (real work, not boxing and moving day) was Friday and used my archaic manual backup process to save copies of all data through close of business on Thursday.

Result was tomorrow we will be able to restore everything but Friday and Saturday relatively easily.  The bad news is, we get sit down and manually re-enter $20,000 in lost sales transaction data.  It could have been much, much worse had I not been a dinosaur in my old ways and manually made backups each and every day I am working.  Three cheers for being an old fart I guess.

The lesson learned here today kids, never trust an automated backup that your IT guy says keep you covered with plenty of redundancy.  Make sure for yourself that you have good backups every chance you get.
Sorry to those who have sent messages to me that I have been missed around DMOZ and BOTW.  I am really, really sorry that I have been mostly non-existence for far two long.  I truly hope that I can get back to some normalcy in a few weeks after we get real life settled back down.

Regards.