Ian Mercer » operations http://blog.abodit.com Living in the World's Smartest House Sat, 07 Jan 2012 19:50:56 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Looking forward to the new year and our new data center http://blog.abodit.com/2009/12/looking-forward-to-the-new-year-and-our-new-data-center/ http://blog.abodit.com/2009/12/looking-forward-to-the-new-year-and-our-new-data-center/#comments Thu, 31 Dec 2009 03:59:00 +0000 Ian Mercer http://blog.abodit.com/?p=55 In the new year I’m going to be moving all our servers over to a data center in Issaquah, WA.  I’m looking forward to having some faster hardware and a better connection able to provide a better experience to all the customers of our digital signage solution.

Happy New Year!

]]> http://blog.abodit.com/2009/12/looking-forward-to-the-new-year-and-our-new-data-center/feed/ 0 When will people learn to backup? http://blog.abodit.com/2009/12/when-will-people-learn-to-backup/ http://blog.abodit.com/2009/12/when-will-people-learn-to-backup/#comments Fri, 11 Dec 2009 08:26:00 +0000 Ian Mercer http://blog.abodit.com/?p=53 More >]]> Had another friend lose a hard drive today without a proper backup.  Pain!

I now have at least 3 copies of everything with staggered backups to different hardware.  For the digital signage software I manage there are two copies on the servers locally and another copy in the cloud on Amazon’s S3 storage which is itself replicated multiple times.

The basic concept that people need to use is “SHARED NOTHING”.

RAID is NOT the answer to data security, it’s a convenient recovery mechanism for failed hard drives but if your data is on two drives connected to the same RAID controller card on the same computer in the same room you have plenty of opportunities to lose it all.

Backups should ROTATE.  Backing up to the same location risks a failure in the backup that could wipe both copies, or copy bad data over good before the mistake is discovered.  For really critical data I have a daily backup, a weekly backup, and a monthly backup.  I also have two backup schedules, morning that copies to one set of drives on controller A and an evening backup that copies to a different set of drives on a different controller.

]]> http://blog.abodit.com/2009/12/when-will-people-learn-to-backup/feed/ 0