Plan for Emergencies—Before they Happen
I was recently emailed by an organization who has recently had their website go belly-up, and they lost most of their recent data. Their development company supposedly has some backups, but are not being the best of communicators right now (it can happen to the best of us).
So, in the email, I was asked to offer my help in getting their site back online. Unfortunately, I can do just about nothing, since the organization has no backups, no data, not even an old database backup.
If you run a website, do the following right now:
- Set up an automated weekly or monthly backup of the entire website (daily, if your data merits that level of backup), including the site database, in case of catastrophe. Keep it locally (i.e. within your offices, or on an accessible backup server). This way, even if your developer goes belly-up, you can transfer the backup to someone else and quickly get back up and running (within a day or two). (I might do a post on how the Archdiocese maintains weekly backups of everything in two separate locations soon...).
- Develop a site maintenance and upgrade plan; with content managed websites, maintenance and security patches must be applied on a monthly or quarterly basis (I do it every week on the Archdiocesan website), otherwise maintenance and upgrade costs will go through the roof in as little as a year's time.
Do these things, and nobody gets hurt.
It's also good practice to have more than one developer in your rolodex (er... iPhone?), in case your main developer is inaccessible. Better yet, have someone on-staff who can help in a pinch (or full time!).
Comments
Wow...bummer.
I feel bad for them...but on the other hand...who was asleep at the wheel? The 'I Love You Virus' struck what...9-10 years ago? That was one of the biggest wake up calls I can recall for most organizations that were at least half-way interested in disaster recovery.
Stuff happens...I know all too well. Sometimes even decent contingency planning fails.
You said 'most of their recent data'. Does that mean they at least have a snapshot or db from launch or shortly thereafter.
I was talking to a prospective web design client today who balked a little at my hosting charges (she's used to the friend of a friend who runs a Ubuntu box in the basement on a timer switch type of hosting plan).
My monthly hosting charge ain't the cheapest...but my hosting provider runs daily/hourly backups of my VPS and I can have a db or file or directory restored in under 30 minutes.
To my way of thinking, that should be the norm...not the exception. And those who don't at least shoot for that level of DR...well...let's just leave it at that.
Have been on a bad host that had a server crash, lost my website, and had no backup. That was a nice wake up call to go with a quality host who does actual backups(can you imagine running a hosting company that doesn't backup). I do from time to time back up sites on my own machine just in case.
Somewhat related, I've had 2 or 3 laptop hard drives crash with irreplaceable pictures, ect, on the drives. I still have the drives in case I ever want to learn how to repair drives. But I'm not paying 2-3 grand for the pictures... unless I win the lottery or something.
I have an external drive I backup on now, but does anyone know a good software that can automate backups for particular folders? I suppose I could write a batch script and use windows scheduler to do it, but is there any open source kind of tools to manage that? I've found Windows to be somewhat unreliable when copying massive amounts of data.
Hey Matt,
I use DropBox for backing up to 'the cloud' but that's only 4gig.
Vista (and I'm sure 7) has a fairly decent backup program to external drive.
I've used XCopy in the past as a poor man's automated backup:
http://www.petefreitag.com/item/99.cfm
Vista Sync Center might do the trick:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/features/sync-center.aspx
I know what you mean about flaky copies though. That's why I'm partial to backup software that performs a verify after copy/backup.
For me personally, when I was on Windows, I preferred creating images of the entire disk. Symantec Ghost and Acronis True Image are probably the best ones out there.
The nice thing about an image is if you have a catastrophic hardware failure. Then, instead of having to reload the OS and perform a restore of particular folders, you just restore the image and bam, you're back in biz.
I've probably seen close to a hundred drive failures over the years (server and pc)...so I don't trust the things at all. I can't count how many times RAID and backups have saved the day.
Great advice. I've had to recover site data before using Google's cache and the Wayback Machine, which aren't exactly comprehensive backups.
While you're restoring your site from your backup services, you'll also want a plan in place to notify important audiences about the status of the site and when it's expected to return to normal. This might include your pastor, council, staff, key volunteers and the parish as a whole. Having access to communications channels such as a breaking news email list, a Twitter feed, and the parish office recorded phone greeting will help reduce the confusion.
Post new comment