ODP Editor: shadow575

Personal Views and Opinions of a DMOZ Volunteer and BOTW Editor

Posts Tagged ‘personal update’

Importance Of Backups

Posted by shadow575 on January 21, 2009

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.

Posted in AOL, DMOZ, ODP, Open Directory, Personal Updates | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Lesson in Humility

Posted by shadow575 on May 21, 2008

Yes I know its two posts in one day, but hey thats my problem can’t keep my own damn mouth shut when I have something to say and its my blog so :-P .

Today I stepped out of my shell as a normally level headed and diplomatic editor (yeah I know some of you will disagree with that, but hey its my dream) and managed to make an Ass out of myself.  Normally I am proud to be an Ass, hey I am a man afterall, but when I am wrong I am wrong and I will usually admit it (unless my wife is involved but thats a different story.

This is another vague post to non-editors, sorry for that but its intended solely as an apology to all ODP editors who witnessed my detour from my normal self.    I allowed some outside pressures and some pent up frustrations come out, directed at something completely unrelated.  Will try not to do that again.

Regards.

Posted in AOL, DMOZ, ODP, Open Directory, Personal Updates | Tagged: , , | 2 Comments »