Over the past week there are two classic examples of why a good backup process is critical. One is the highly publicized story of the June Issue of Business 2.0 that was inadvertently deleted two weeks before print and the backup had failed. The second is our own story.

Last summer we setup VMware Server to run test images of servers before deploying to production. One such virtual machine was running Koha, an open source application we were evaluating for our school library. We ended up deciding to stick with Koha and put it into production. Things were busy with the start of the school year so we decided to put off moving it to our production environment that has better redundancy and a full backup process. We never did get around to moving Koha.

Two weeks ago we had an extended power outage, everything came back up just fine except for that VMware server – it was throwing an Operating System Not Found error. I thought no big deal, we have the box setup with software RAID, we can just swap the boot drive and it will come back up. Tried to swap, no dice. Next we tried to recover the data, turns out that partition table was corrupt and I couldn’t get any of the tools to extract the data off of the ext3 file system. We now have turned to our last resort, Gillware, data recovery experts recommended by Ed Buford.

The sad part is that we have had to learn this lesson twice, see my earlier post – Hard Drive Recovery and Backup Solutions. Determined not to mess up a third time, we are reevaluating our backup strategy and processes to make sure that this doesn’t happen again. God willing, we will have our new strategy finalized by next Tuesday, including a better monitoring solution.

One of the services that we are trying out as a secondary, off site backup option is MozyPro (see Jon Edmiston’s post). They offer a 10% discount for non profit or educational institutions. Mozy just signed on GE as a customer and released a Mac client. I spoke with Mozy yesterday and they said that their upcoming release will support backups off of a network share as well.