Tao Of Backup Wailing Wall Story
"All your data" really means "*All* your data".
I dutifully backed up all my hard work on all my Macs, so I figured I was safe, all my source code was stored, and though I hadn't read the Tao of Backup, I did practice most of it, old and new backups scattered around the place in secure locations.
All well and good, but it wasn't any of that data that I lost. Instead, my ISP in the US managed to destroy our entire internet presence. They had no working backups at all, and we were relying on them to backup their machine. The FTP and Web site were easy enough to regenerate since we had a local copy, but all of our mailing list subscribers were lost and many of our CGIs and servers had to be rewritten (some from scratch, others from old versions).
The moral of this story is to backup all your data, even data you don't necessarily create or store yourself.
Peter N Lewis
Perth, Australia,
Wed 10-Dec-1997 6:08am
