Schneier first notes how the Wine Therapy web bulletin board, a place where wine aficionados posted and shared information since 2000, was lost when someone hacked the site and deleted the database. The site owner had been sick and was not keeping a backup. (Join the club.)
After a few anecdotes about broken travel links, the loss of the blogging website Greatest Journal, and MySpace losing control of members' personal data, Schneier says of our online data: "there's no way to predict what will disappear when." And although there are some emerging personal archiving tools, "we don't know which bits we want until they're no longer there." He sadly concludes that "there's not much we can do about it."
Some of the comments are interesting to read. One reader says that "Link rot is actually a healthy way for clutter to evaporate from the web leaving room for useful information." I'd like to see this person's reaction when their blog "clutter" disappears one day.
Someone named Daniel commented that there's no simple way to backup your dynamic website, but they remain hopeful: "[I] Also expect that somebody will make it easy to backup your site--and not just from a browser perspective--and then we'll just have to wait until it becomes so cheap it's ubiquitous." hmm... maybe I'm on to something here.
Hey Frank! I was excited when I found your blog. Hope things are well with you and Becky, and congratulations on Ethan!
ReplyDeleteI no longer lose sleep over the potential for losing data because I've settled into a nice backup routine. I'll share it here... anyone else have a routine they'd like to share?
Once/week: Log into myPHPadmin and make database backups as zip files for all of my sites, store them on hard drive of personal computer. (I do all code/graphics development on the same computer, so I have a copy of that on there as well).
Perpetually: Mozy.com's backup service backs up everything on a single machine for $4.99/month using SSL over the net.
Monthly: I make a Ghost image of my machine and store it on an external harddrive.
None of my sites change so often that losing a week's worth of data would be that disastrous. This probably wouldn't work for a high traffic commerce site :)
Hello, Bryan! Glad you found my blog... a needle in the haystack of the blogosphere. ;-)
ReplyDeleteSounds like a good routine... unfortunately it costs you time and money each week. Many people know they should have a similar routine, but even the minor costs in time and money make them put the task on the bottom of their to-do-list, and they never get around to it. And many people don't even recognize the danger of not backing up there stuff.
http://money.cnn.com/2006/06/07/technology/data_loss/index.htm