{"id":805,"date":"2009-12-14T00:13:26","date_gmt":"2009-12-14T00:13:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/?p=805"},"modified":"2009-12-14T00:13:26","modified_gmt":"2009-12-14T00:13:26","slug":"lets-stop-talking-about-backups","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/2009\/12\/14\/lets-stop-talking-about-backups\/","title":{"rendered":"Let\u2019s stop talking about \u201cbackups\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"side\" style=\"width:123px;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/12\/emergency.jpg?ssl=1\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"width:125px;\" class=\"sideimg\" alt=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/12\/emergency-thumbnail.jpg?w=730&#038;ssl=1\" \/><\/a><\/span>Is your desktop backed up?<\/p>\n<p>Did you backup that server?<\/p>\n<p>Are your backups on a different machine?<\/p>\n<p>Do you have offsite backups?<\/p>\n<p>All good questions, all best practices.<\/p>\n<p>But let\u2019s stop talking about \u201cbackups.\u201d 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 <em>restore<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>And that\u2019s when you discover that:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The backed-up files were encrypted with a cryptographically-secure key, the only copy of which was on the machine that was lost<\/li>\n<li>The server had enormous amounts of configuration information stored in the IIS metabase which wasn\u2019t backed up<\/li>\n<li>The backup files were being copied to a FAT partition and were silently being truncated to 2GB<\/li>\n<li>Your backups were on an LTO drive which was lost with the data center, and you can\u2019t get another LTO drive for three days<\/li>\n<li>And a million other things that can go wrong even when you \u201chave\u201d \u201cbackups.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The minimum bar for a reliable service is not that you have done a backup, but that you have done a <em>restore<\/em>. If you\u2019re 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\u2019ve done a <em>restore<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Let\u2019s stop asking people if they\u2019re doing backups, and start asking if they\u2019re doing restores.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Is your desktop backed up? Did you backup that server? Are your backups on a different machine? Do you have offsite backups? All good questions, all best&hellip; <span class=\"read-more\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/2009\/12\/14\/lets-stop-talking-about-backups\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">Read more <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">&#8220;Let\u2019s stop talking about \u201cbackups\u201d&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p83KNI-cZ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=805"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/805\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}