Did you backup that server?
Are your backups on a different machine?
Do you have offsite backups?
All good questions, all best practices.
But let’s stop talking about “backups.” Doing a backup is too low a bar. Any experienced system administrator will tell you that they have a great backup plan, the trouble comes when you have to restore.
And that’s when you discover that:
- The backed-up files were encrypted with a cryptographically-secure key, the only copy of which was on the machine that was lost
- The server had enormous amounts of configuration information stored in the IIS metabase which wasn’t backed up
- The backup files were being copied to a FAT partition and were silently being truncated to 2GB
- Your backups were on an LTO drive which was lost with the data center, and you can’t get another LTO drive for three days
- And a million other things that can go wrong even when you “have” “backups.”
The minimum bar for a reliable service is not that you have done a backup, but that you have done a restore. If you’re running a web service, you need to be able to show me that you can build a reasonably recent copy of the entire site, in a reasonable amount of time, on a new server or servers without ever accessing anything that was in the original data center. The bar is that you’ve done a restore.
Let’s stop asking people if they’re doing backups, and start asking if they’re doing restores.