blog.ecorrado.us

Over the last day or two I’ve been reading about the sudden demise of the Web-based community of JournalSpace.com. I don’t know much about the community but it was an online journal site that judging from fourms on the Internet was pretty close knit. Basically what happened is they lost all of the data on their database server. It is unclear how this happened, but it may have been sabotage. Regardless, they did not have a proper backup strategies in place. All they were doing was mirroring, which while great for continuity if a drive goes down, doesn’t help if the data is erased for some reason.

So what are we to take from this? I see three lessons. The first two are for site administrators. First is that people who are in charge of running Web sites need to make sure they have proper backup and recovery procedures. These procedures should including testing restores to make sure that you can get back up and running. Second, if you have a disgruntled IT person leave your business, make sure that they no longer have any access to the systems.

The lesson for users of these systems, especially smaller, less popular systems, is to make sure you have your own backups. While this might be more work for some systems than others, and sometimes the users of these systems might not know how to make Web-based backups, it needs to be done if yu want to be sure to have your data long-term. Even cutting and pasting the posts into a Word document after each post would have saved a lot of hardwork and memories people put into their posts on JournalSpace.com