When I was in school, I had visited the offices of Texas Instruments on a field trip. One of the most awesome things I saw there was a hard wood basket ball court, 3 stories within the ground. Well, in school you do pay attention to the basket ball court, more than the other equipment buried deep undergr
ound. While playing a game of ball does sound great, they had dug hundreds of feet to save something that was most precious to them, their data.
One can always argue that chances of a Nuclear Bomb destroying data is next to none and even so, in such a situation we will have much worse things to worry about. Well, you are right. But there are many other culprits who are going after your data:
- We are only human – I have ever so often absent-mindedly deleted a file to only regret doing so a moment later. Even the awesome people at Flickr recently almost lost all the files of one of their users.
- Too Hard (Disk) to handle – Your server can go kaput and take all your data with it. This is a fairly common occurrence too. In fact the crash of one of my favorite blogs inspired me to start blogVault. You can read more about that here https://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/12/international-backup-awareness-day.html
- Hackers – With their understanding of the nooks and crevices of the system they can wreck havoc. Peace of mind or pieces of mind. Choose!!!
- Fire/Flood – While less likely to occur, one should not risk any data which they value to such a calamity. One can only imagine the damage done by something like the Brisbane floods.
- Loss/ Theft – While blogVault deals with WordPress backups which reside on servers, the possibilities of theft (https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2007/12/19/verizon-colo-theft-in-denmark/) at a data center seems most unlikely. On the other hand we carry data important to us on phones, laptops, disk drives and USB sticks. In all such situations loss or theft can be one of the ways to lose your precious data.
At blogVault, we understand the value of backups done right. Our first principle is to have multiple copies of our customer’s data on not only our server’s but also on the extremely robust Amazon S3. Amazon S3 in turn keeps 3 copies of the data in at least two distant locations. This ensures that the customers’ blog or website, which has been built with tremendous care and effort is absolutely safe.
The right way to do backups is to have an offsite copy. This point cannot be emphasized enough.