Today, our backup needs are as numerous as they are diverse. But the need for a good backup strategy-the “what”-has been consistent. Since then, I’ve simplified my personal infrastructure, and I now use a prosumer NAS instead of a Windows Server. Those latter products were vastly simplified, for good and bad, but they offered some level of integration with various services, including, over time, backup services both local in the cloud. So I moved through various versions of Windows Server, and eventually migrated to Windows Home Server and then Windows Server Essentials. It was a way to keep my skills up to date so that I could write about the technology more effectively. For me specifically, it was a way to stay familiar with Microsoft technologies at a time in which I was no longer implementing them professionally. Doing so was pragmatic in a number of ways: For those working in IT, this has always been a good way to keep up with the technologies one was using at work or soon would be. Like many of you, I spent many years trying to duplicate the Microsoft corporate infrastructure we’re familiar with at home. Naturally, this strategy evolved over time with the technology. And while I have strayed from time-to-time, I’ve always believed in and preached the importance of maintaining a solid backup strategy. Those experiences have guided my subsequent interactions with data backup across a wide range of local and cloud solutions over time. And in discovering this horrible reality, I found restore religion too. Restore is the other side of the backup coin, of course. In doing so, I discovered that the tapes we had backed up to were unreadable. A few years later, when we dismantled that web server-a $5500 Dell with a Pentium Pro 166 processor-I decided to use the tape backup elsewhere. The final irony here is that the tape backup we bought never actually worked. Hey, it was the 1990s.īut that is only part of the story. And as part of our fix, we finally did what we should have done in the first place. A trip to Fry’s Electronics and about $2000 later, we were able to fix the problem and do so, delicately, without losing any data. We slept, awkwardly, in our boss’s VW Jetta when we finally realized at some awful hour of the night that we needed more parts. Long story short, a co-worker and I spent the entire night there troubleshooting the server. And I needed to fly out immediately and race down to a co-location facility in San Jose to fix the problem. Our one web server, the only source of all of our data, had come up lame. I was working in my second IT-related job, as the webmaster and a jack of all tech trades, for a small San Francisco Bay-area start-up. My come to religion moment with backup happened in the late 1990s.
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