The Value of Backups

Backups are a good thing. They are one of those things that everyone believes is a good idea, but usually one of the last things anyone actually wants to spend the time to setup.

On May 27th, 2007 we had our first hard drive die. It was from our main internal development server, housing our source control, databases and common file shares. Of course after we realized it was dead, the following comments we made.

"It did seem like it was slow"

"hmm... guess we should have known better seeing that it didn't boot up the other day and we had to rebuild the boot record"

Fortunately for us, we were backing things up remotely and were able to recover all of the critical items in a matter of hours. Too bad we didn't back up the back up scripts and will have to go through the pain of setting up the backups again.