Learning Someone Else's Lesson: Offsite Backups

[Rob Williams]

From our front-page news:

Today's storage solutions are, for the most part, more stable than ever, but that doesn't mean backing up your data shouldn't be taken seriously. We've wrote about this in our news many times, and even wrote a few articles in the past on how to get it done quickly and efficiently. If you're the owner of a website, even a small one, the importance of backing up is even more essential because the data not only affects you, but many others as well.

Earlier this week, one of the largest flight simulation communities, Avsim, found out just how important it is to keep offsite backups, and yes, the offsite part is key. You see, the admins did keep backups, like responsible site owners, but what wasn't considered was what would happen if hackers broke in and also took down the backup server, which is exactly what happened. In an instant, years of work... gone.

This absolute obliteration could have been aided with offsite backups, so let this be a lesson to any website owner out there. Make sure you download nightly copies of your website (syncing also works), so that you always have the most up-to-date copy of your website handy, in case something absurd like this happens. I feel for these guys either way though... to lose an actively-built site like that has got to sting more than a little.

The site's founder, Tom Allensworth, said that the site would be down for the foreseeable future and was unsure if would ever go back up. "The method of the hack makes recovery difficult, if not impossible, to recover from," Mr Allensworth said in a statement. "AVSIM is totally offline at this time and we expect to be so for some time to come. We are not able to predict when we will be back online, if we can come back at all. "

Source: BBC News​

 

[Kougar]

Hmm... yes I guess this is an extremely good reason to have offsite backups. I suspect extremely few sites actually have completely separate backups though...

Not everyone backs up as they should.
Of those sites that do, often backups are not done daily or even weekly.
If the backups are done they are most often done on separate disks within the same server.
Backing up to a completely separate server as Avism has done is well above the curve, especially as they backed up daily.
Backing up to an external media device (as suggested in the article) is one thing, but unless they disconnect it again after every backup then it makes no difference and serves to provide no additional safety.

In all honestly I would not have seen a reason to back up to a third site, short of a flood, fire, or earthquake backing up to a separate unrelated server seems beyond sufficient. For the hackers to have targeted the server AND the backups on the second server "malicious" doesn't even begin to describe it. I do hope they are having some intelligent law enforcement doing computer forensics to try and track down who did this.

 

[Rob Williams]

To be honest... there's absolutely no excuse for not having an off-site backup. Sure, it's on another server, but what happens in some unlikely event that a fire broke out? You'd have absolutely no means for restoration. It's a <strong>huge</strong> issue if you keep your backups in the same location as the original... no need for it.

How our scheme works is this. We currently use two servers for the site (one for forums, another for the site), and a nightly backup is made to the opposite server. On a tri-weekly basis, the site backup on my own PC gets updated (through rsync), so at any given time, I have three copies of the site on this PC, from three different days. Past that, I have two copies of the same backups on the same computer (two hard drives), and also archive the entire backup and copy it to my NAS box. The entire process is done with a few different scripts I wrote, and ANY web admin should be able to get something like this done.

I'd also like to start making regular copies of these backups to DVD and then keep them at a friends house. That'd be the ultimate solution.

 

[Merlin]

To be honest... there's absolutely no excuse for not having an off-site backup. Sure, it's on another server, but what happens in some unlikely event that a fire broke out? You'd have absolutely no means for restoration. It's a huge issue if you keep your backups in the same location as the original... no need for it.

How our scheme works is this. We currently use two servers for the site (one for forums, another for the site), and a nightly backup is made to the opposite server. On a tri-weekly basis, the site backup on my own PC gets updated (through rsync), so at any given time, I have three copies of the site on this PC, from three different days. Past that, I have two copies of the same backups on the same computer (two hard drives), and also archive the entire backup and copy it to my NAS box. The entire process is done with a few different scripts I wrote, and ANY web admin should be able to get something like this done.

I'd also like to start making regular copies of these backups to DVD and then keep them at a friends house. That'd be the ultimate solution.

Man, that sounds like a lot of work, but I guess it comes with the job.
By the way, I thinks it's great

 

[Rob Williams]

It's a fair amount of work to get a good backup script working in the first place... mainly because of the planning. You need to make sure that things are timed properly, but given that our server is fast and there's not much traffic at 4:00AM, it's never a problem. Plus, the entire process now is automated... I do nothing. So that three hours of work on a script saves me hours in the long-run... and plus, I have off-site backups. The most important thing ;-)