• Backup Practices
  • Backup Bookmarks
  • Backup Software
  • Data Loss & Theft
  • External Drives
  • Online Backup
  • Reviews
  • Tutorials
  • Website Backups

FileSlinger Backup Blog

  • Home
  • About
  • Contact
  • Blog
  • E-zine
  • Questions?
  • Review Policy
  • Comment Policy
  • Disclosures

Lessons from the Demise of Journalspace

January 9, 2009 by Sallie Goetsch Leave a Comment

If you’ve never heard of journalspace, don’t feel bad—I hadn’t either until it popped up in my Google Alerts for “Backup.” My ignorance notwithstanding, the blog hosting company had been around for 6 years and had 14,000 visitors each month. Now all those blogs have vanished, with the bloggers left struggling to retrieve their posts from the Google cache if they didn’t have backups of their own.

So what happened? Someone—or something—erased all the data on the journalspace server. There were no backups. One of my Scary Statistics posts mentions that 60% of companies that lose their data go out of business within 6 months. Journalspace was forced to shut its doors much sooner than that.

The story has been all over the net—just look at my Backup Bookmarks posts over the past few days for a collection of links. Feel free to go read them for more details, or look at the journalspace blog. (Since they’re putting their domain name up for sale, that link may not be good for long.)

What I want to concentrate on here are two lessons we can all learn from this catastrophe.

RAID Is Not Backup

I once compared some form of backup or another to RAID, and some kind(?) person was quick to point out to me the error of my ways. Now that I own three different RAID devices (the Maxtor Shared Storage II, the Buffalo LinkStation Mini, and the Buffalo Quattro), I understand RAID a bit better. By using a “mirroring” array, RAID can help protect you from data loss. Because all data is written to two or more disks simultaneously, you’re still safe if one of those drives fail. That was the case with my first Maxtor Shared Storage II, Teras. One day the drive started making horrible clicking noises. Fortunately for me, I had Teras in RAID 1 (mirroring) configuration, and only one of the two drives inside the box was damaged. The wizards at Seagate/Maxtor were able to retrieve the data from the other drive for me without trouble, and I restored that data to the replacement MSS-II (named Teratides, which means “son of Teras”) fairly easily from the USB drive Jay sent it back to me on.

If you’re running a server, you definitely want RAID—the higher level, the better. Servers are generally on 24/7 and that kind of wear and tear makes it more likely one of the disks will go.

But RAID is no substitute for backup. It doesn’t protect against viruses, theft, human error, or natural disaster. Anything deleted from the first drive automatically disappears from all the mirroring drives. Journalspace had two drives in a mirroring (RAID 1) configuration, and no backups. They learned the limitations of RAID the hard way.

Don’t Count on Your ISP for Backups

Some hosting companies make backups of their clients’ data, and some don’t. Even if yours does, remember that it’s your data and therefore your responsibility to protect it. Make a backup onto your own computer. I don’t know what provisions the journalspace platform made for its users to back up their blogs, but one reason I like WordPress is the ease of backing up my blog content. Just install the WP-DB-Backup plugin and tell it how often to e-mail your backup to you. Restoring the data or moving it to another blog is easy.

Store Backups Off-site

There’s a possibility that what happened to journalspace was the result of sabotage by a disgruntled former employee of their datacenter. When you keep your backups in your office, anyone who has access to the physical location of your computer also has access to your backups. While you want some backups close at hand, you also need to keep copies of your most critical data somewhere else.

My heart goes out to all the people who have lost their jobs. I hope none of journalspace’s former customers goes out of business because of it. And I don’t want anyone who reads this blog to have to experience that kind of pain.

Back up. Back up. Back up.

Technorati Tags: journalspace,RAID,offsite backup,WP-DB-Backup

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)

Related

Filed Under: Data Loss & Theft, RAID Tagged With: reminder

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Search

Google Ads

Categories

  • Announcements
  • Archiving
  • Backup Bookmarks
  • Backup Devices
  • Backup Practices
  • Backup Software
  • CD & DVD Backups
  • Data Loss & Theft
  • Data Recovery
  • Drive Failure
  • Drive Failure
  • Drive Imaging
  • Drive Imaging
  • E-mail Backups
  • Events
  • External Drives
  • Flash Drives
  • Guest Bloggers
  • Hardware Failure
  • Humor
  • Mac Backups
  • Mobile Backup
  • Network Storage
  • Network Storage
  • Offsite Backups
  • Online Backup
  • RAID
  • Removable Drives
  • Reviews
  • Storage
  • Tape Backup
  • Traveling Backups
  • Tutorials
  • Uncategorized
  • Website Backups

Tags

Elsewhere

  • BACN
  • East Bay WordPress Meetup
  • Rhymes with Sketch
  • The Author-izer
  • WP Fangirl

Find Sallie Online

Backup Poll

When was the last time you backed up your computer?

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...
  • Polls Archive

Tags

.MAC Acronis Amazon S3 annual archive backup Backup Bookmarks BACN Bart-PE Buffalo carbon copy cloner Carbonite CloudBerry Cloud Computing Coding Horror CrashPlan disaster recovery Dmailer DriveImage DriveSavers Dropbox DVD Flickr Ghost Google Docs Iron Mountain Karen's Replicator LinkedIn LiveVault Maxtor Memeo Mozy RAID Rebit reminder Retrospect Seagate social backup Spare Backup SyncBack SyncBack Freeware Titan Backup WordPress XHD year-end backup Zoogmo

Copyright © 2022 · Metro Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in