Computers are so unreliable. You’d think that with as long as I’ve been working with computers that I would’ve learned my lesson by now and gotten some sort of reliable backup and recovery plan in place at home. Unfortunately, if you did think that, you’d be wrong.

I’ve said for a long time that I was going to get some sort of plan in place. As a matter of fact, I’ve been working on writing my own application for backing up data off and on for quite a while now (I’ve run into a few snags that I’ve not been able to figure out how to get working, which is why its not done yet, but that’s another story for another time). Anyway, the system disk on my server at home crashed last week, which is why Yexley.Net was down for a while.

Fortunately, all of my actual *data* was on the secondary drive in the server, which is still OK, so I didn’t lose any of my data. I did, however, lose several hours of my life getting the server rebuilt after getting the system disk replaced (thanks again Mom).

But, we’re back up-and-running again now, so all is good. There may still be a few quirky little things that might not work as expected on the web site, and if you notice that to be the case, please let me know. Next on my priority list though is to get a solid backup and recovery plan in place. No, seriously…I really AM going to do it this time. I’ve been looking at several different options lately, none of which I’m real crazy about, because they all seem to cost more money than I’d rather spend right now, but I’ve come to the conclusion that, if I really want to make sure that my data is backed up and secure, its not going to happen for free. Its going to cost some money to make sure that we’ll have all of our pictures and videos of Phoenix for years to come.

Its kind of funny how this sort of thing happens…the day after the night that the disk crashed, Jeff Atwood wrote a fantastic article on the importance of having a good backup plan for your data. I’m particularly fond of the explanation for how to use rsync to backup mac/*nix systems. I plan to start using that on my laptop as soon as possible (just need to get an external hard drive and enclosure to back it up to). I’m also considering his recommendation for using Acronis True Image with some external hard drives as one option for backing up the server.

Then, a few days after that, this article detailing how to setup RAID 1 disk mirroring was published on Lifehacker. That sounds like a pretty good idea too, although I’m not sure its going to work for me or not. I’d like for it to, because I think overall it would be my cheapest option (just buy another one of these to mirror that new one I just replaced the system disk with), but having done some light reading about how to setup RAID 1 on the motherboard I have, I think I’d have had to have done that setup from the start before having formatted the system drive and installing the OS. Not completely sure, still need to research that a bit to be sure, but I think that’s the case.

Finally, a friend of mine has been singing the praises of Mozy for a while now, so I’ve been looking at that as well. Seems like a pretty decent, and certainly simple, solution, but the cost might ultimately turn me off. The home version is fairly reasonable ($5/month for unlimited backup storage isn’t bad at all), but its not compatible with Windows Server 2003. In order to use Mozy to backup my server, I’d have to go with the Pro version, which is considerably more expensive ($4/month, plus $.50/GB for backup storage…that could get pretty expensive pretty quick with a lot of photos and videos to backup).

So I’m still trying to figure out which direction to go. Any option is going to cost us some coin, but we definitely need to get something in place to secure some peace of mind. Any other suggestions for backup solutions are certainly welcome. What are you using for your backups?