Backups
I have a shared hosting account with a web host. I have several sites on there, including a Rails web app that is pretty important to the Cocoa course I’m teaching (it manages online submissions and grading). I’ve also got the Subversion repository hosting the code for that app.
Two days ago, I got an email from my hosting provider telling me that two of the drives in the server’s RAID had failed, and I should back up as much of my data as possible because they were going to have to take the server down to replace the drives.
Back up my data? They must mean I should just grab the data that I need urgent access to, in case I need it while the server’s down. I appreciated the warning, but I didn’t do anything.
The language of the email nagged at me, though, and the next day I downloaded all the critical stuff from the server: the databases from the Rails apps I have live, my Subversion repo, and a few other things. The “what’s the status of my server” page on the host’s website had repeated warnings to back up “as much of your data as possible”, and it was worrying me.
Turns out I was worried with good cause: they’ve confirmed that they don’t back up their customers’ data by default. If you want nightly backups, that’s an add-on to your account. You have to pay extra.
Is it just me, or is that rather unprofessional for a web hosting company? I’d entrusted a lot of data to them; in retrospect, I realize if my home directory on the server had gotten wiped out, I’d have lost a lot of important data. At least in this case they gave me fair warning; but what if something more catastrophic were to happen? What if there was a freak earthquake under the data center and every drive head in the server struck the platter? What would they tell their customers? “Everything’s hosed and we don’t have backups, all your data is gone forever, sorry”? My feeling is, if other people are paying you to hold their data, it’s your responsibility (i.e. not optional) to ensure the data you’re entrusted with is safe. I’d assumed backups were included; whoever heard of a hosting company that doesn’t back up data?
Update: turns out they do nightly images of the entire server, to protect against disasters such as this one. I guess the add-on gets you the ability to request a restore from backup of your home directory, in case you screw something up. Sorry for the confusion, but I think they should definitely be clearer about that.
Even though nothing bad happened, this little event has gotten me thinking about backups. I don’t have a backup of my main machine’s hard drive that’s anywhere near current. The idea of losing it all at a stroke is suddenly much nearer now.
